In 2024, 13,779 immigrants who reached Italy came from Bangladesh. Moreover, around 12,500 migrants were from Syria, whereas 7,700 people originated from Tunisia. These three nationalities constituted more than half of the total individuals arrived. Mediterranean routes to Europe The Mediterranean Sea recorded the largest number of deaths and missing cases of migrants worldwide. The Mediterranean Route leading to Italy is known as the Central Mediterranean Route, which counts the highest number of fatalities among the different Mediterranean routes. This route includes the crossing from North Africa to Italy, as well as to Malta. The main departing country is Libya, while Tunisia, Egypt, and East Algeria are minor departing shores. After the Central Mediterranean Sea, the Eastern Mediterranean Sea registered the second-highest number of deaths and missing people. The Eastern Mediterranean route includes migration flows from Türkiye to Greece and Cyprus. Main countries of arrival Between January and October 2024, Italy was the European country registering the largest number of migrants' arrivals. All the 55,000 immigrants reached the country by sea. Spain was the second country of first arrival in Europe, followed by Greece. The overall number of migrants who set foot on Italian shores expanded in the last years. However, the death and missing cases did not drop proportionally to the number of people who reached the coast.

From January to December 2024, around 66,000 migrants arrived in Italy by sea. Between 2014 and 2024, the number of migrants setting foot in the country peaked in 2016 at 181,000 individuals, whereas in 2019 only 11,400 people were rescued from the sea. In fact, stricter immigration policies were enacted between 2018 and 2019 by the right-wing and populist government supported by the League and the Five-Star Movement. Among the most frequent countries of origin declared upon arrivals in 2024, Bangladesh and Syria ranked in the first places. About 13,800 were Bangladeshi citizens, while around 12,500 immigrants came from Syria. Asylum seekers and minors among the migrants In 2023, the largest number of asylum applicants in Italy were from Bangladesh. In fact, 23,450 requests were recorded as of December 2023, while 18,300 applicants were from Egypt, the second most common nationality among asylum seekers. In recent years, many unaccompanied minors reached the Italian coasts. In 2024, 8,043 children migrated without their parents into the country. Contrasting opinions and distorted perceptions  According to the data published by Ipsos, a part of Italians tend to overestimate the size of the immigrated population. The results of this survey uncovered the presence of distorted perceptions in 2018: people thought that about 28 percent of the Italian population was not born in Italy, whereas the actual percentage was around ten. Furthermore, the public opinion on migration was controversial. In the same year, roughly half of the population perceived migrants as a risk for the Italian economy. On the other hand, 18 percent of Italians believed that migration could be a resource for the country.

As of December 2024, Lombardy was the region in Italy hosting the largest share of immigrants, followed by Emilia-Romagna, Lazio, and Piedmont. Lombardy is the region with the highest number of inhabitants in the country. The north Italian region has ten million residents, around one sixth of the total national population, and was housing 18,200 immigrants. The Mediterranean route to Europe  In 2020, 955 migrants died or went missing in the Italian Central Mediterranean Sea in the attempt to reach Europe. In 2024, 66,317 people arrived at the Italian shores, 91,300 individuals less compared to 2023. Death and missing cases still represent a serious hazard for the people who want to reach Italy from North Africa. Racism on the rise in Italy Race-related violence is strictly correlated with immigration. According to 2020 data, the cases of racial physical violence increased, in particular between 2016 and 2018. Over these three years, the cases of body violence ranged from 24 to 127 attacks. Similarly, insults, threats, and harassment became more widespread. Between 2017 and 2019, the cases grew from 88 to 206, while only in the first three months of 2020 there were 53 episodes of racist insults, threats, and harassment.

Between January and November 2021, 59.7 thousand migrants arrived in Italy by sea. August recorded the highest number of arrivals. During 2020, instead, the number of migrants who stepped foot in Italy peaked in July at 7.1 thousand people. The largest number of people migrating to Italy weas registered in the years 2016 and 2017. In October 2016, 27.4 thousand individuals reached the Italian coasts by crossing the Mediterranean Sea, the highest monthly figure recorded in the past four years.

The main ports of arrivals  

In 2018, the main port where migrants arrived was Pozzallo, a city in Sicily, in the South of Italy. Pozzallo is in the province of Ragusa, located directly on the Mediterranean Sea. The number of migrants who set foot in Pozzallo in 2018 amounted to 3.8 thousand people. In that year, the Island of Lampedusa was the second most important harbor for the arrivals. Almost 3.5 thousand migrants arrived on this Sicilian island. Lampedusa is only about 113 kilometers (70 miles) away from Tunisia and represents an important entry port for the whole of Europe.

Asylum applications mostly denied 

In 2020, a total of 27 thousand asylum applications were registered in Italy. However, data on the examined requests show that asylum was denied in most of the cases. As a matter of fact, in 76 percent of the cases examined over 2020, applicants were not given the asylum status. Only 11 percent of migrants received the refugee status during that year, whilst another 11 percent of people were assigned a subsidiary protection.

Italy IT: International Migrant Stock: Total data was reported at 5,788,875.000 Person in 2015. This records an increase from the previous number of 5,787,893.000 Person for 2010. Italy IT: International Migrant Stock: Total data is updated yearly, averaging 1,340,516.500 Person from Dec 1960 (Median) to 2015, with 12 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 5,788,875.000 Person in 2015 and a record low of 459,553.000 Person in 1960. Italy IT: International Migrant Stock: Total data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by World Bank. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Italy – Table IT.World Bank.WDI: Population and Urbanization Statistics. International migrant stock is the number of people born in a country other than that in which they live. It also includes refugees. The data used to estimate the international migrant stock at a particular time are obtained mainly from population censuses. The estimates are derived from the data on foreign-born population--people who have residence in one country but were born in another country. When data on the foreign-born population are not available, data on foreign population--that is, people who are citizens of a country other than the country in which they reside--are used as estimates. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 people living in one of the newly independent countries who were born in another were classified as international migrants. Estimates of migrant stock in the newly independent states from 1990 on are based on the 1989 census of the Soviet Union. For countries with information on the international migrant stock for at least two points in time, interpolation or extrapolation was used to estimate the international migrant stock on July 1 of the reference years. For countries with only one observation, estimates for the reference years were derived using rates of change in the migrant stock in the years preceding or following the single observation available. A model was used to estimate migrants for countries that had no data.; ; United Nations Population Division, Trends in Total Migrant Stock: 2012 Revision.; Sum;

From January to December 2018, the number of migrants arrived in Pozzallo (Sicily) amounted to 3,818, the largest value nationwide. Moreover, Lampedusa registered 3,468 arrivals, ranking second in the chart. In 2018, about 23.4 thousand migrants landed in Italy. In 2021, Tunisian and Bangladeshi were the most frequent nationalities of migrants. In particular, 11 thousand people came from Tunisia, whereas 5.3 thousands were from Bangladesh.

Italy IT: International Migrant Stock: % of Population data was reported at 9.681 % in 2015. This records a decrease from the previous number of 9.713 % for 2010. Italy IT: International Migrant Stock: % of Population data is updated yearly, averaging 5.227 % from Dec 1990 (Median) to 2015, with 6 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 9.713 % in 2010 and a record low of 2.505 % in 1990. Italy IT: International Migrant Stock: % of Population data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by World Bank. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Italy – Table IT.World Bank.WDI: Population and Urbanization Statistics. International migrant stock is the number of people born in a country other than that in which they live. It also includes refugees. The data used to estimate the international migrant stock at a particular time are obtained mainly from population censuses. The estimates are derived from the data on foreign-born population--people who have residence in one country but were born in another country. When data on the foreign-born population are not available, data on foreign population--that is, people who are citizens of a country other than the country in which they reside--are used as estimates. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 people living in one of the newly independent countries who were born in another were classified as international migrants. Estimates of migrant stock in the newly independent states from 1990 on are based on the 1989 census of the Soviet Union. For countries with information on the international migrant stock for at least two points in time, interpolation or extrapolation was used to estimate the international migrant stock on July 1 of the reference years. For countries with only one observation, estimates for the reference years were derived using rates of change in the migrant stock in the years preceding or following the single observation available. A model was used to estimate migrants for countries that had no data.; ; United Nations Population Division, Trends in Total Migrant Stock: 2008 Revision.; Weighted average;

Italy Vital Statistics: Net Migration: Male data was reported at 55,638.000 Person in 2017. This records an increase from the previous number of 42,115.000 Person for 2016. Italy Vital Statistics: Net Migration: Male data is updated yearly, averaging 161,518.000 Person from Dec 2002 (Median) to 2017, with 16 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 621,061.000 Person in 2013 and a record low of 12,745.000 Person in 2015. Italy Vital Statistics: Net Migration: Male data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by National Institute of Statistics. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Italy – Table IT.G005: Vital Statistics: By Region and Sex: Annual.

Italy IT: Refugee Population: by Country or Territory of Origin data was reported at 47.000 Person in 2017. This records a decrease from the previous number of 51.000 Person for 2016. Italy IT: Refugee Population: by Country or Territory of Origin data is updated yearly, averaging 66.500 Person from Dec 1992 (Median) to 2017, with 26 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 224.000 Person in 2002 and a record low of 1.000 Person in 1992. Italy IT: Refugee Population: by Country or Territory of Origin data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by World Bank. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Italy – Table IT.World Bank.WDI: Population and Urbanization Statistics. Refugees are people who are recognized as refugees under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees or its 1967 Protocol, the 1969 Organization of African Unity Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, people recognized as refugees in accordance with the UNHCR statute, people granted refugee-like humanitarian status, and people provided temporary protection. Asylum seekers--people who have applied for asylum or refugee status and who have not yet received a decision or who are registered as asylum seekers--are excluded. Palestinian refugees are people (and their descendants) whose residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948 and who lost their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict. Country of origin generally refers to the nationality or country of citizenship of a claimant.; ; United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Statistics Database, Statistical Yearbook and data files, complemented by statistics on Palestinian refugees under the mandate of the UNRWA as published on its website. Data from UNHCR are available online at: www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html.; Sum;

BackgroundMost studies on immigrant health focus on immigrant groups coming from extra-European and/or low-income countries. Little attention is given to self-rated health (SRH) in the context EU/EEA migration. To know more about health among European immigrants can provide new insights related to social determinants of health in the migration context. Using the case of Italian immigrants in Norway, the aim of this study was to (i) examine the levels of SRH among Italian immigrants in Norway as compared with the Norwegian and the Italian population, (ii) examine the extent to which the Italian immigrant perceived that moving to Norway had a positive or negative impact on their SRH; and (iii) identify the most important factors predicting SRH among Italian immigrants in Norway.MethodsA cross-sectional survey was conducted among adult Italian immigrants in Norway (n = 321). To enhance the sample's representativeness, the original dataset was oversampled to match the proportion of key sociodemographic characteristics of the reference population using the ADASYN method (oversampled n = 531). A one-sample Chi-squared was performed to compare the Italian immigrants' SRH with figures on the Norwegian and Italian populations according to Eurostat statistics. A machine-learning approach was used to identify the most important predictors of SRH among Italian immigrants.ResultsMost of the respondents (69%) rated their SRH as “good” or “very good”. This figure was not significantly different with the Norwegian population, nor to the Italians living in Italy. A slight majority (55%) perceived that their health would have been the same if they continued living in Italy, while 23% perceived a negative impact. The machine-learning model selected 17 variables as relevant in predicting SRH. Among these, Age, Food habits, and Years of permanence in Norway were the variables with the highest level of importance, followed by Trust in people, Educational level, and Health literacy.ConclusionsItalian immigrants in Norway can be considered as part of a “new mobility” of high educated people. SHR is shaped by several interconnected factors. Although this study relates specifically to Italian immigrants, the findings may be extended to other immigrant populations in similar contexts.

Italy IT: Net Migration data was reported at 264,145.000 Person in 2012. This records a decrease from the previous number of 1,006,308.000 Person for 2007. Italy IT: Net Migration data is updated yearly, averaging 164,927.000 Person from Dec 1962 (Median) to 2012, with 11 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 1,624,300.000 Person in 2002 and a record low of -231,781.000 Person in 1967. Italy IT: Net Migration data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by World Bank. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Italy – Table IT.World Bank: Population and Urbanization Statistics. Net migration is the net total of migrants during the period, that is, the total number of immigrants less the annual number of emigrants, including both citizens and noncitizens. Data are five-year estimates.; ; United Nations Population Division. World Population Prospects: 2017 Revision.; Sum;

As of 2024, Romanians were Italy's largest foreign population, with over one million Romanians living in Italy during the period considered. Albania and Morocco followed with 416,000 and 412,000 people, respectively. From a regional perspective, the Northern regions had the largest foreign population. Lombardy had some 1.1 million foreign residents, the largest in the country.

IntroductionThe health status and health care needs of immigrant populations must be assessed. The aim of this study was to evaluate barriers to accessing primary care and the appropriateness of health care among resident immigrants in Italy, using indicators regarding maternal health, avoidable hospitalization, and emergency care.MethodsCross-sectional study using some indicators of the National Monitoring System of Health Status and Healthcare of the Immigrant Population (MSHIP), coordinated by the National Institute for Health, Migration and Poverty (INMP), calculated on perinatal care, hospital discharge, and emergency department databases for the years 2016–2017 in nine Italian regions (Piedmont, Trento, Bolzano, Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Umbria, Latium, Basilicata, Sicily). The analyses were conducted comparing immigrant and Italian residents.ResultsCompared to Italian women, immigrant women had fewer than five gynecological examinations (8.5 vs. 16.3%), fewer first examinations after the 12th week of gestational age (3.8 vs. 12.5%), and fewer than two ultrasounds (1.0 vs. 3.8%). Compared to Italians, immigrants had higher standardized rates (× 1,000 residents) of avoidable hospitalizations (males: 2.1 vs. 1.4; females: 0.9 vs. 0.7) and of access to emergency departments for non-urgent conditions (males: 62.0 vs. 32.7; females: 52.9 vs. 31.4).ConclusionsIn Italy, there appear to be major issues regarding accessing services and care for the immigrant population. Policies aimed at improving socioeconomic conditions and promoting integration can promote healthy lifestyles and appropriate access to health care, counteracting the emergence of health inequities in the immigrant population.

Italy IT: Refugee Population: by Country or Territory of Asylum data was reported at 167,260.000 Person in 2017. This records an increase from the previous number of 147,370.000 Person for 2016. Italy IT: Refugee Population: by Country or Territory of Asylum data is updated yearly, averaging 48,668.500 Person from Dec 1990 (Median) to 2017, with 28 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 167,260.000 Person in 2017 and a record low of 5,473.000 Person in 1998. Italy IT: Refugee Population: by Country or Territory of Asylum data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by World Bank. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Italy – Table IT.World Bank.WDI: Population and Urbanization Statistics. Refugees are people who are recognized as refugees under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees or its 1967 Protocol, the 1969 Organization of African Unity Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, people recognized as refugees in accordance with the UNHCR statute, people granted refugee-like humanitarian status, and people provided temporary protection. Asylum seekers--people who have applied for asylum or refugee status and who have not yet received a decision or who are registered as asylum seekers--are excluded. Palestinian refugees are people (and their descendants) whose residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948 and who lost their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict. Country of asylum is the country where an asylum claim was filed and granted.; ; United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Statistics Database, Statistical Yearbook and data files, complemented by statistics on Palestinian refugees under the mandate of the UNRWA as published on its website. Data from UNHCR are available online at: www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html.; Sum;

Italy is one of the most representative ‘new immigration countries’. Between the 1980s and the 1990s, it became a major country of destination for immigrants coming from Asia, Middle East and North Africa. As a result, since the mid-nineties, immigration has gained salience within the Italian political debate. Building on the existing literature on agenda-setting and framing studies, this article studies the evolution of the immigration issue in Italy over the last two decades. It focuses on the framing and, more specifically, the position political actors tend to adopt when debating on immigration. In particular, the main research questions are: to what extent is the framing of immigration associated with the traditional left vs. right spectrum? Do incumbent political parties tend to adopt a different position toward immigration than opposition parties? This article analyses party competition dynamics over the immigration issue in Italy from 1995 to 2011. The author carried out a political-claim analysis of articles from two Italian national daily newspapers. Findings show that immigration is more a positional issue than a valence one. Political actors’ positions towards migration appear to be anchored to the old left vs. right dimension of the political conflict. This demonstrates that parties’ engagement within the political conflict goes beyond electoral campaigns. Finally, being in government seems to play a crucial role in “softening” the way party actors frame immigration, in terms of both the arguments used and the pro- or anti-immigration positions adopted.

The data project includes large-scale longitudinal analysis (2015-2020) of online hate speech on Twitter (N=847,978). A tweet database was generated: collected tweets using Twitter’s Application Programming Interface (API) (v2 full-archive search endpoint, using Academic research product track), which provides access to the historical archive of messages since Twitter was created in 2006. To download the tweets, we first defined the search filter by keyword and geographic zones using the Python programming language and the NLTK, Tensorflow, Keras and Numpy libraries. We established generic words directly related with the topic, taking into account linguistic agreement in Spanish (i.e., gender and number inflections) but without considering adjectives, for instance: migrant, migrants, immigrant, immigrants, refugee (both in masculine and feminine forms in Spanish), refugees (both in masculine and feminine forms in Spanish), asylum seeker, asylum seekers (the keywords are available as supplementary materials here. For the process of hate speech detection in tweets, we used as a basis a tool created and validated by Vrysis et al. (2021). For this research, the tool has been retrained with: supervised dictionary-based term detection; and also taking an unsupervised approach (machine learning with neural networks) Using a corpus of 90,977 short messages, from which 15,761 were in Greek (5,848 with hate toward immigrants), 46,012 were in Spanish (11,117 with hate toward immigrants) and 29,204 in Italian (5,848 with hate toward immigrants). This corpus comes from two sources: the import of already classified messages in other databases (n=57,328, of which 5,362 are generic messages in Greek, 23,787 are generic messages and 9,727 are messages with hate toward immigrants in Spanish, and 18,452 are generic messages in Italian), and the other from messages manually coded by local trained analysts (in Spain, Greece and Italy), using at least 2 coders with total agreement between them (the level of agreement in the tests was 94%), dismissing those without a 100% intercoder agreement (n=33,649, of which 6,040 are messages about immigration without hate and 4,359 are messages with hate toward immigrants in Greek; 11,108 are messages about immigration without hate and 1,390 are messages with hate toward immigrants in Spanish; and 4,904 are messages about immigration without hate and 5,848 are messages with hate toward immigrants in Italian). The corpus was divided into 80% training and 20% test.In the models, embeddings were used for the representation of language and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) for the supervised text classification. Specifically, the embeddings were created with the 1,000 most repeated words with 8 dimensions (first input layer), two hidden layers’ type Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) with 64 neurons each, and a dense output layer with one neuron and softmax activation (the model is compiled with Adam optimizing and the Sparse Categorical Crossentropy loss).

Bangladesh and Syria were the most frequent countries of origin declared upon arrival in Italy between January and December 2024. Tunisians represented twelve percent of the migrants who reached the Italian shores, recording the third-highest figure. In 2024, the total number of migrants arrived in Italy by sea added up to 66,300.

Remigration is typically envisioned as the final stage of the migration experience, a one-way movement from the host country to the country of origin. This article offers a novel, intimate view of historical return migration as a more complex and discursive process. The case study is Italian American migrants at the turn of the twentieth century, one of the groups which – according to historical statistics – was most actively engaged in Transatlantic remigration; more recent readings, however, show that many of these returnees eventually re-emigrated to the US. Using for the first time immigrant newspapers against the baseline of the Italian public discourse, the article analyzes Italian migrants’ own accounts of remigration as a way to access the more subjective dimension of migration. The integration of text mining and Critical Discourse Analysis will show that migrants were experiencing migration as a sense of identity crisis manifested through feelings of being misunderstood, rejected and unappreciated. These results indicate a less material reading of (re)migration, that is beyond economic reasons, and that for many individuals remigration was a bi-directional movement, only fully concluded when they were no longer experiencing a sense of identity crisis, be it in their homeland or the host society. The article will argue that this was the visible outward sign of a much more profound issue: the Italian Government’s view of (r)emigration –mainly through the lens of domestic economic advantage –deeply underestimated the complexity of migration as a social phenomenon and as a profoundly changing psychological experience. In the long run, this error of judgment deeply damaged Italy as many of those ritornati felt misunderstood and disillusioned and crossed the Atlantic again, this time never to return.

Information about asylum applications lodged in 38 European and 6 non-European countries. Data are broken down by month and origin. Where possible, figures exclude repeat/re-opened asylum applications and applications lodged on appeal or with courts. For some countries, the monthly data are available since 1999 while for others at a later period.

The widespread presence of criminal organizations in strong states presents a theoretical and empirical puzzle. How do criminal organizations — widely believed to thrive in weak states — expand to states with strong capacity? I argue that criminal groups expand where they can strike agreements with local actors for the provision of illegal resources they control. This service is particularly useful in strong states, where illegality carries higher risks. Using a novel measure of mafia presence, I show that mafias expansion was successful in places with an increased demand for informal unskilled labor, and where mafias could fill this demand by offering migrant labor from mafia-affected areas. Organized crime expansion relied on deals with local actors needing to keep illegal transactions hidden from the state -- a service critical in strong states. Rather than just substitutes to weak states, criminal organizations should be reconceptualized as also offering services useful in strong state contexts.