Half a century of internal and international migration: Some long-term sociological consequences

The article compares internal migration to the northern Italian city of Turin in the post-war decades to the more recent international migration, and stresses the similarities of the structural condition of migrant workers and families in the two cases. Census data from 1971 to 2011 is used to show similarities in the labour market, and position in the urban structure. It is shown that internal migration to Turin had long-term effects on the local structure of social stratification, not least because children of migrants were educationally disadvantaged - a disadvantage similar to that documented in many cases of international migration. The article offers explanations of this inequality in terms of conditions regulalrly created in labour migrations. It is argued that our evidence provides an alternative - less ethnic - approach to understanding the inequalities associated with many migration waves.