Alberto Bisin (New York University)

joint with Giulia Tura

We study the cultural integration of immigrants in Italy, estimating a structural model of marital matching and fertility along ethnic dimensions. We exploit rich administrative demographic data on the universe of marriages, births and separations from 1995 to 2012. We estimate strong preferences of ethnic minorities’ towards socialization of children to their own identity as well as high cultural intolerance of Italians towards immigrant minorities. In long-run simulations, we find that cultural intolerances, as well as fertility and homogamy rates, slow-down the cultural integration of some immigrant ethnic minorities, especially Latin America, East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Nonetheless, 75% of immigrants integrate into the majoritarian culture over the period of a generation. We show by counterfactual analysis that a lower cultural intolerance of Italians towards minorities would lead to slower cultural integration by allowing immigrants a more widespread use of their own language rather than Italian in heterogamous marriages. Finally, we quantitatively assess the effects of large future immigration inflows.

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