The Diverse Nature of Living Apart Together Relationships: An Italy-France Comparison

Despite the growing number of papers concentrating on economic and social integration of immigrants across Europe, just a few analyze their subjective wellbeing. We address such oversight by studying immigrant's life satisfaction and concentrating – for the first time in the European context – on how the social comparison with two reference groups (natives and other immigrants) within the host country may affect immigrants' life satisfaction. Using data from six rounds of the European Social Survey, we constructed two measures of economic distance that compare each immigrant with the average of the group of natives and the group of immigrants with the same characteristics. Our results indicate that when the disadvantage between the immigrant and the average value of each of the two reference groups becomes smaller (or, eventually, becomes advantage), immigrant's life satisfaction increases. The effect of the social comparison with natives appears larger than the social comparison with immigrants and, in both cases, it is stronger for individuals with higher level of education.