ITALIAN COUNTRY REPORT

IMMIGRATION

Immigration  to Italy is a phenomenon that became relevant only at the end of the 1970's, as the country was traditionally a source of migrants to other countries (it's estimated  that between 1876 and 1976, some 24 million Italians emigrated abroad).
At the start of 2011 there were 4,570,317 foreign  residents in Italy and registered with the authorities.

This amounted to 7.5% of the country’s population. These figures include more than half a million children born in Italy to foreign nationals—second generation immigrants are becoming an important element in the demographic picture—but exclude foreign nationals who have subsequently acquired Italian nationality; this applied to 65,938 people in 2010. They also exclude illegal immigrants, the so-called clandestini whose numbers are difficult to determine. They are about 670.000.

Since the expansion of the European Union, the most recent wave of migration has been from surrounding European nations, particularly Eastern Europe, and increasingly Asia, replacing North Africa as the major immigration area. Some 997,000 Romanians, around 10 % of them being Romanis, are officially registered as living in Italy, replacing Albanians and Moroccans as the largest ethnic minority group.

The distribution of foreign born population is largely uneven in Italy: 86.45% of immigrants live in the northern and central parts of the country (the most economically developed areas), while only 13.55% live in the southern half of the peninsula.

The table below shows the increase of immigration in Italy from the 2003 to the 2011. 

Source: demo.istat.it

The graphic below shows the increase of immigration from the 2002 to the 2011

The imagine shows the geographical distribution of immigrants in Italy

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