Immigrants' legal status, permanence in the destination country and the distribution of consumption expenditure

Abstract

This article considers the distribution of consumption expenditures for a large sample of documented and undocumented immigrants in Italy. Using the one-sided and two-sided Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests, we show that the distribution of consumption of immigrants with higher permanence in the host country first-order stochastically dominates the one of immigrants with lower permanence. These distributions are first-order stochastically dominated by the ones of natives with similar characteristics. Apart from differences in the first years since migration, undocumented immigrants show similar consumption distributions to the ones of documented immigrants.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Francesco Fasani and Abdul Noury for helpful discussions and Gian Carlo Blangiardo for providing the data. Biagio Speciale is a postdoctoral researcher of the F.R.S.-FNRS and gratefully acknowledges their financial support. The usual disclaimer applies.

Notes

¹ISMU stands for Iniziative e Studi sulla Multietnicità. The representativeness of the sample has been ensured through the use of an intercept point survey (McKenzie and Mistiaen, 2009).

²The age threshold corresponds to the 99th percentile of the age distribution of immigrants. As common practice, we use the square root of the number of household members as an equivalence scale. See also Battistin et al. (2009).

³The quartiles of years since migration for documented and undocumented immigrants are in Tables 2 and 3.

⁴To compute p-values, we rely on the built-in Matlab function kstest2. Under the null hypothesis, they are functions of n and m and can be derived from numerical approximations of the theoretical distribution of KS₁ and KS₂ (see, e.g. the tables in Conover, 1998).

⁵We only consider immigrants with years since migration below or equal to 6 because of the small sample size of undocumented immigrants with higher years of permanence in Italy. This is due to the fact that immigrants without residence permit had several opportunities to get legal status through amnesty programmes.