Nowadays, the socioeconomic integration of immigrants in European countries is a very prominent issue in the political agenda. The aim of this paper is to understand how the pre-migration and current education and socioeconomic status affects immigrants’ labor market integration and their children’s educational success in Italy. We analyse not only migrants’ socioeconomic status in absolute terms, but we also develop a measure of relative education (see Ichou 2014), as a proxy of immigrants’ unobserved ability, aspiration and motivation. For the analyses, we use data from the 2011-2012 Istat survey “Social condition and integration of foreign citizens” (ISTAT, 2016), integrated with macro-data from the Barro-Lee dataset and the World Bank. Results from hierarchical linear regression models indicate that positively selected immigrants are more often unemployed than less positively selected ones, but immigrants’ selectivity is not related to the status attained in the host society. On the other side, immigrants’ relative education and pre-migration socioeconomic status significantly reduce their children’s risks of early school dropout.