Immigration in Italy: The Great Emergency

Giuseppe G. De Bartolo, Universita della Calabria

Like most South European countries, Italy has experienced a strong immigration pressure for several years, coming from the South and from the East. A great part of these flows is illegal immigration from North Africa, Tunisia, Morocco and Libya. These countries are becoming meeting points of huge masses of people who escape from sub-Saharan Africa, because of wars, epidemics, persecutions, etc. Because of the intensification of such flows, Italy has become a country with a net migration rate of 5 x 1000. At the present rate, in ten years’ time, Italy will have 7-8-million immigrants out of about 58 million inhabitants. These facts are examined in this paper, as well as the problems connected to immigrants’ integration, and possible strategies of cooperation with the countries of origin of the illegal flows.