Immigration to Italy. Demographic and Economic aspects

3 INTRODUCTION The paper I have chosen to write as the final act of my educational route at the Università degli Studi di Pavia intends to cast light on the hot issue of immigration. A fact accepted as “physiologic” for all societies, it has lately become a major extent issue. What’s most unexpected - as the relevant research work and records start building up - is the great, ever-growing gap between the entity of the event and its knowledge. 1 , although the beginning of a literature on the subject has been noticed. In any case the still existing gaps in the general topic of migration flows must be filled in. By starting from this very incomplete familiarity with the phenomenon, one may in the end understand how the immigration issue, which has become a topic of debate within many member states of the European Union and more generally the western world, has blown up in our Country with an unusual and disproportionate virulence. It is in fact reasonable to state that immigration has become - in the last decade - a “hot” topic, one that shifts votes, attract crowds, is debated in political arenas and not by more or less competent subjects. It has now become a political and social problem with plenty of rumour, a lot of nonsense and very few certainties attached to it. In order to understand the reason of sudden interest by the media and the political world for this phenomenon, which in the past decades could have easily been rated as a “technical issue”, open to and actually entrusted to bureaucrats, it just takes to glance at the figures published by EUROSTAT in the 2007 report 2 : in the 2002 – 2006 period, the number of people arriving to our Country is equal to 1.843.000 3 with peaks in 2003 and 2004. Speaking of inflows, Italy has become - in absolute terms - the second European immigration pole (just Spain does better than us) and, on a world basis, comes higher than the United States 4 if related to population; therefore our peninsula outclasses Countries with strong and historical migration traditions like France, England and Germany. The above-mentioned are high-impact data, for two main reasons: first of all it’s worth to emphasize that Italy has always been a land of emigrants; it’s a fact that Italy’s National History is spangled with copious flows of our fellow citizens migrating abroad (North and South America, Australia, European Countries), in search of a job and better life conditions; the notion of a trend reversal in recent years and the fact that Italy has become a Country in need of and able to host immigrants even in a large number, appears as being not well accepted and understood by the natives. 1 As recalled in the introduction to L’incidenza economica dell’immigrazione edited by Massimo Livi Bacci and verified by the author of the present report . 2 Pastore F., La paranoia dell’invasione e il futuro dell’Italia published on “Limes” 4/2007. Pages 22-23 3 Pastore warns us to also consider the regularization factor, which has indeed greatly influenced the total figure 4 Pastore F., op. cit. page 29