Eralba Cela

Invited Session
Migrants and Refugees in Europe: social, economic and health-related issues
Organizers: Manuela Stranges (Università della Calabria) - Livia Elisa Ortensi (Università di Bologna)
Chair: Anna Paterno (Università di Bari)
Discussant: Livia Elisa Ortensi (Università di Bologna)
Room: T7
Floor: ground
Short summary: This session is devoted to exploring social, economic, and health-related issues of migrants and refugees in different European contexts. The paper from Haodong et al. looks at the combination of human capital accumulation and investment at destination on future economic performance of refugees in Sweden. The authors find that, overall, refugees’ income increases with total hours devoted to human capital investments (except for men who attained secondary education) suggesting a positive labor market return. However, the magnitude of the return varies depending on refugee’s initial level of education, it is the greatest for those who attained university education. This educational difference suggests that human capital investments help refugees restore the value of their original educational credentials. The income effects of human capital investment vary depending on the type of training. Refugee women tend to benefit more from learning language, compared to training in introduction programme (EPA). In contrast, refugee men tend to benefit from EPA (except those who attained secondary education), but not from Swedish language training (SFI). The paper from Piccitto concentrates on the role of legal environment on the asylum applications, focusing on Italy. In 2020, the Italian government approved the so-called “Immigration and security” decree. Among its intentions, regarding a wide range of matters (contrast to mafia and terrorism, urban security), the decree remarkably changed the regulation of asylum, immigration and citizenship. The decree has abolished the Humanitarian protection, which has traditionally been used as the main source of legal protection for migrants (the other two being the refugee status and the subsidiary protection in Italy). The paper focuses on the impact of the introduction of this restrictive law on immigration on the number of asylum application in the country, by leveraging Eurostat data and performing a range of statistical analyses. The paper from Amati et al. focuses on loneliness among older migrants in Italy, analyzing the impact of different types of support networks, namely the instrumental/support and emotional networks, while controlling for standard socio-economic variables. The authors identified seven different network typologies have been identified, ranging from the complete ego network, where all the alters are present, to the almost empty network comprising only children and friends. The results of their study indicate that there is a significant association between loneliness and network typologies. However, loneliness might also affect the embeddedness in a network since it might lead to isolation from others.

Paper
Social networks and loneliness among older migrants in Italy Author(s)  Viviana Amati   Elisa Barbiano Di Belgiojoso   Eralba Cela