Working-poor, children and migrants: Italy’s ‘new poor’

This chapter focuses on three, partly overlapping, social groups that appear as not only the “losers of the crisis” but of the overall Italian model of social regulation: the working poor, children and migrants. The working poor and underage children were already over-represented among the poor before the 2008 crisis set in and were also the worst affected, while the third group, migrants, are a new entry because Italy became an immigration country only comparatively late. Together, they well represent the characteristics of the Italian poverty regime, its over-expectations with regard to family solidarity, the skewedness of social protection in favour of pensions with little attention for children and for work-family conciliating policies, a large and increasing presence of precarious jobs with a blurring of boundaries between the formal and informal economy. Furthermore, the analysis of these three groups allows to explore the experience and risk of poverty from different perspectives: the individual and the household level, the functioning of the labour market, the household gender division of labour, the functioning of welfare, the costs of migration.