Immigration to Italy

Foreign residents as a percentage of the regional population, 2011

Immigration to Italy occurs from a variety of countries.

As of January 2014, there were an estimated 5,000,073 foreign nationals resident in Italy.^[1] This amounted to 8.3% of the country’s population and represented an increase of 612,352 (+13,95) over the previous year. These figures include 97,000 children born in Italy to foreign nationals (19% of total births in Italy) in 2014, but exclude foreign nationals who have subsequently acquired Italian nationality; this applied to 106,000 people in 2014.^[1] They also exclude illegal immigrants whose numbers are difficult to determine. The distribution of foreign born population is largely uneven in Italy: 84.9% of immigrants live in the northern and central parts of the country (the most economically developed areas), while only 15.1% live in the southern half of the peninsula.^[1]

There is a high level of illegal immigration to Italy - in May 2008, The Boston Globe quoted an estimate of 670,000 undocumented residents.^[2] Many immigrants from Africa make the dangerous boat journey across the Mediterranean to Italy. This has led to numerous disasters such as the May 2007 Malta migrant shipwreck, the 2009 Mediterranean Sea migrant shipwreck, the 2011 Mediterranean Sea migrant shipwreck, the 2013 Lampedusa migrant shipwreck, the 2014 Libya migrant shipwreck, the 2014 Malta migrant shipwreck, and the April 2015 Libya migrant shipwrecks.^[3] Once in Italy, immigrants seeking asylum often are unable to leave due to the Dublin Regulation requirement that they stay in the first country where they are processed.^[4]

Since the expansion of the European Union, the most recent wave of migration has been from surrounding European states, particularly Eastern Europe, and increasingly Asia,^[5] replacing North Africa as the major immigration area. About a million Romanians, around 10% of them being Roma,^[6] are officially registered as living in Italy. As of 2013, the foreign born population origin was subdivided as follows: Europe (50.8%), Africa (22.1%), Asia (18.8%), America (8.3%), and Oceania (0.1%).^[7]

Statistics

Immigration by country^{[note 2]}

Country	2010[9]	2011[10]	2012[11]	2013[12]	2014[13]
Romania	887,763	823,100	834,465	933,354	1,081,400
Morocco	431,529	407,097	408,667	426,971	524,775
Albania	466,684	451,437	450,908	464,962	502,546
China	188,352	194,510	197,064	223,367	320,794
Ukraine	174,129	178,534	180,121	191,725	233,726
Philippines	123,584	129,015	129,188	139,835	165,783
India	105,863	116,797	118,409	128,903	160,296
Moldova	37.971	130,619	132,175	139,734	150,021
Egypt	82,064	65,985	66,932	76,691	135,.284
Bangladesh	73,965	80,639	81,683	92,695	127,861
Tunisia	103,678	82,066	82,997	88,291	122,354
Poland	105,608	84,619	84,749	88,839	97,566
Serbia  Montenegro	95,875	n.a.	43,816	109,474
Pakistan	64,859	69,877	71,031	80,658	80,485
Sri Lanka	75,343	71,203	71,573	79,530	84,405
Senegal	72,618	72,458	73,702	80,325	97,781
Ecuador	85,940	80,645	80,333	82,791	91,145
Macedonia	92,847	73,407	73,972	76,608	84,318

See also

• Extracomunitarian

Notes

References