Immigration to Italy

Foreign residents as a percentage of the total population, 2011

The footballer Mario Balotelli, italian from ghanaian descent

Immigration to Italy is a relatively new phenomenon, as the country was traditionally a source of migrants to other countries.

At the start of 2011 there were 4,570,317 foreign nationals resident in Italy and registered with the authorities.¹ This amounted to 7.5% of the country’s population and represented an increase of 257,176.¹ (not including 78,082 births from immigrant parents) a sharp drop from the 388,000 increase the year previous.² 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 2010.¹ They also exclude illegal immigrants, the so-called clandestini whose numbers are difficult to determine. In May 2008 The Boston Globe quoted an estimate of 670,000 for this group.³

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,⁴ replacing North Africa as the major immigration area. Some 997,000 Romanians,⁵ around 10 percent of them being Romanis,⁶ are officially registered as living in Italy, replacing Albanians and Moroccans as the largest ethnic minority group.

As of 2011, the foreign born population origin of Italy was subdivided as follows: Europe (53.4%), Asia (16.8%), North Africa (14.8%) the Americas (8.1%), sub-Saharan Africa (6.7%) and other lands (such as Oceania) (0.2%). 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.

According to Eurostat, in 2010 there were 4.8 million foreign-born residents in Italy, corresponding to 8.0% of the total population. Of these, 3.2 million (5.3%) were born outside the EU and 1.6 million (2.6%) were born in another EU Member State.⁷

Statistics

Total legal immigrant population, as of 1 January. Source: demo.istat.it.

2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011
1,549,373	1,990,159	2,402,157	2,670,514	2,938,922	3,432,651	3,891,295	4,235,059	4,570,317

Country	2005⁸	Increment 2005-2011	2011⁸
Romania	248.849	289,3	968.576
Albania	316.659	52,4	482.627
Morocco	294.945	53,4	452.424
China	111.712	87,9	209.934
Ukraine	93.441	114,8	200.730
Philippines	82.625	62,4	134.154
Moldova	37.971	244,9	130.948
India	54.288	123,0	121.036
Poland	50.794	114,6	109.018
Tunisia	78.230	35,9	106.291
Peru	53.378	84,8	98.630
Ecuador	53.220	72,2	91.625
Egypt	52.865	70,9	90.365
Macedonia	58.460	53,8	89.900
Bangladesh	37.785	118,2	82.451
Sri Lanka	45.572	77,9	81.094
Senegal	53.941	50,1	80.989
Serbia Montenegro Kosovo	58.174	38,1	80.320
Pakistan	35.509	113,2	75.720
Nigeria	31.647	69,4	53.613
Bulgaria	15.374	232,6	51.134
The ethnic groups above constitute about the 85% of foreign citizens in Italy as of 1 January 2011.