History of Italian Migration
The second half of the 19th century and the industrial era marked periods of massive emigration in Italy. In the United States, South America and Europe, the migratory flow of Italian foreigners was spread throughout the West. Between 1870 and 1970, approximately 26 million Italians (14 million of them during the "great emigration" of 1880-1914) sought to escape the economic instability, poverty, social archaism and political tensions of their newly unified country. For the rulers of the time, this migratory "hemorrhage" became an economic, diplomatic and cultural issue. It was necessary to preserve the Italianness of those who were no longer called emigrants but "Italians abroad".
Today, it is estimated that there are nearly 5 million Italians in the world, and that there are nearly 58 million people with Italian ancestry.
During the 1960s, the trend was reversed. It was Northern Italy that became the land of welcome, as it experienced its economic miracle, with an annual growth rate of around 6% and almost no unemployment. In the south, the situation is quite different, and the gap is widening between the two parts of the country. As a result of underemployment in the south, Calabrians, Sicilians and Neapolitans, especially young, single men, moved to Bologna, Florence and the "industrial triangle" formed by Milan, Turin and Genoa. Between 1951 and 1961, the number of Italians trying their luck in the North is estimated at 2 million. Integration was not easy. The people of the North discriminated against those whom they contemptuously called the terroni (Southern rednecks). They were considered ignorant, lazy, disrespectful of certain hygienic and civic standards. These stereotypes finally disappeared in the 1970s, when internal immigration stabilized. Today, almost 50% of the Milanese population has southern origins.
These large-scale migratory phenomena were largely relayed by the cinema(Pane e Cioccolata, The Godfather, Good Morning Babilonia, No Dogs Allowed, Jasmine). The Museo dell'emigrazione italiana (MEI) has just been opened in Genoa.
Demographics at half-mast
In 2015, the drop in the birth rate was accompanied for the first time since 1919 by a decrease in the Italian population, bringing its fertility rate down to 1.34 children per woman. In the following years and until today, the fertility rate has remained low. In 2022, the rate will fall to 1.25, the second lowest in Europe after Spain. A study by the national statistics institute (ISTAT) worryingly predicted that the Italian population would fall from 60 million in 2020 to 58.6 million in 2025 and 53.7 million in 2065. More than 20% of the population is over 65 years old and still working, while many young, highly qualified people are emigrating due to lack of job opportunities and career prospects. In 2022, nearly 160,000 Italians left, 3% more than in 2017.
The gender distribution in Italy is fairly even. There are 49% men to 51% women, with an event in April 2022: for the first time an Italian court decided to recognize the identity of a non-binary person.
Life expectancy is 80.6 years for men and 85.1 years for women. A beautiful longevity, the highest in Europe, brutally impacted by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. The mortality rate was higher than in other countries: 8.29% in Italy against only 0.3% in Germany. In Italy, at the beginning of 2023, an estimated 160,000 people died with Covid-19, with Lombardy having the most deaths.
Overall, the most populated Italian regions are Lazio, Lombardy, Campania, Sicily and Piedmont. Northern Italy remains a densely populated area, but here too the distribution is largely dictated by natural constraints. The mountains are relatively sparsely populated, while the coastal plains of northern and central Italy, the Po Basin and the urban areas (67% of the Italian population) are densely populated. For example, the Valle d'Aosta has a density of 39.2 inhabitants per square kilometer, while Lombardy, with a population of about 10 million, has 417 inhabitants per square kilometer, and the metropolis of Milan, the country's economic capital, had 3,249,821 inhabitants in January 2021.
Italy, land of migration
With a low natural growth rate and an aging population, immigration to Italy is the third major component of the Italian population.
From the 1960s, after African independence, the first so-called post-colonial migrations came from Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia, while Italians who had been living in Libya, northeast Africa or Latin America returned to their native countries - around 1.25 million at the beginning of the 21st century. Since the 1980s, other populations of legal or illegal migrants have been arriving in large numbers, including nationals of former Soviet countries, Eastern Europe, Romania, Ukraine, Albania. Estimated at almost 2.5 million people by the ISTAT (October 2009), this emigration increased by 16.8% in 2010, the largest increase ever recorded in Italy, mainly due to the arrival of Romanians. These unprecedented migratory flows compensate for the lack of low-skilled labor, which is essential for key sectors of the local economy, including agriculture, the hotel industry, construction and personal services.
In 1989, the Martelli law established the basis for immigration control, which allowed the regularization of nearly 700,000 foreigners. However, from the 1990s onwards, the model of integration of foreigners reached its first limits. The public opinion, conveyed by certain media, was sensitive to theories of increasing insecurity linked to the presence of these immigrants, deliberately ignoring their contribution to the country's economy. The lack of strong legislation on the control of these increasingly important migratory flows exasperates the Italian population. Violent acts of a racist nature have occurred in Bologna and Rome, where the Romanian community, the largest in number, is particularly targeted. The nationalist parties seized the debate and the northern leagues believed that this "invasion" should be stopped. They reactivated their separatist claims between the North and the South, accusing the Mezzogiorno of harboring mafia organizations. In fact, new foreign mafias are present in Lombardy. At the heart of this illegal immigration, they are involved, among other things, in human trafficking. Conflicts between these foreign communities are added to the delinquency cases.
Immigration at a time of closed borders
In the 1990s, the borders began to close as illegal immigration increased in all Western European countries.
In 1991, the arrival of thousands of Albanians in the port of Bari indicates a new route of passage. In the years 2010-2020, Italy is above the European average, with 6% of its population being foreigners, and a record figure in 2017: more than 111,000 arrivals, with migrants from the Maghreb, Turkey, Libya, Bangladesh or even Pakistan. For mafia networks, Italy is a strategic transit point before sending those who want to go to Northern Europe. According to data published by the Ministry of the Interior, at the beginning of 2023, more than 87,000 people arrived in Italy, compared with 55,000 in 2022 and more than 29,000 in 2020.
As in Spain and Greece, the difficulty of monitoring all the Italian coasts and the proximity of poor or impoverished countries such as Libya make the peninsula one of the main "gateways" to Europe. The main host countries (Germany, France, United Kingdom) fear that Italy, a member of the Schengen area, is only a stopover. Indeed, once foreigners have obtained regularization on Italian soil, they can move more easily to other European countries. In recent years, the issue of migrants between Italy and France has become a source of political and diplomatic tension, particularly in Ventimiglia, a town on the Ligurian border 11 km from Menton, which manages the Roya transit camp. Tensions have risen at sea, when the Italian authorities refused to open the ports to the rescue ship Ocean Viking with 230 migrants on board in November 2022.
Many migrants want to stay in Italy
On the one hand, Italy is tightening the conditions of entry into its territory, on the other hand, there is a consolidation of existing migratory flows. The granting of citizenship to foreign migrants is increasing. Between 2021 and 2022, the number of non-EU citizens with a regular residence permit will increase by almost 6%, from 3,373,876 (January 2021) to 3,561,540 (January 2022), including American, Swiss and European foreigners. This makes Italy the fourth European country with the highest number of asylum applications, behind Germany, France and Spain.
Beyond the rhetoric of the right-wing and far-right coalition currently in power, the regularizations carried out by the various governments are encouraging the gradual integration of immigrants into Italian society. Mixed unions and marriages are opening up opportunities. This diversity could benefit the demography. We are currently observing the growing role of self-employment of foreign populations in the peninsula's economy. We find these people working on their own in construction, fast food, crafts, services, agriculture... Another indication of increasing stabilization is the presence of people who have been able to benefit from family reunification or residence permits for family reasons.
