Measuring immigrants' integration in Italy on the basis of official statistics

This contributions analyses the problems involved in the creation of a system of indicators for the integration of immigrant communities in Italy utilising the official statistics. In the first section, the evolution of foreign immigration in Italy is reconstructed since the 1980s, focusing in particular on the past decade. This rich and complex portrait, however, increases the difficulties of the analysis, due to the considerable differences in almost all the profiles of the immigrant communities in Italy. In the second section, aspects and measurements of integration process are identified considering the definitions of integration adopted at the political level or discussed in the scientific debate. The reference spheres of the integration process are considered to be the migration characteristics, demographic aspects (in terms of characteristics and behaviour), economic aspects (work and income), social aspects (relations with the receiving and sending countries, housing, health and deviance), and cultural aspects (education and language knowledge). The last section of the article examines the ways in which the available statistics enable us to analyse some of the features of integration identified previously. Attention is focused on the social and demographic aspects enabling us to make a general portrait of the characteristics of the main foreign communities, and on the insertion in the labour market, a fundamental condition for achieving a full integration in the host society. An examination of the data shows a growing immigration with an increasingly complex structure.