Italians’ and foreigners’ internal mobility in Italy

Oliviero Casacchia, Università di Roma
Cecilia Reynaud, University of Rome Tre
Salvatore Strozza, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
Enrico Tucci, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)

Internal mobility in Italy, after periods of both stagnation and intense growth, different directions and actors, showed a marked increase also thanks to the contribution of the foreigners residing in Italy. In the last years, in fact, international immigration seems to have affected greatly the nature and features of internal mobility. Between 1995 and 2009, the changes of residence between Italian municipalities increased of 18%. Simultaneously, the contribution of the foreign population to internal migrations reached the level of 16%. The increase of the number of foreign residents, their greater propensity to move within the country, and structural factors such as the greater incidence of foreigners within the younger age-groups, may only partly explain these changes. We use data from the population register on changes of residence, which allows the knowledge of individual movements and which is the source mostly used to study internal mobility. This work aims at assessing the structural characteristics of internal migrations of the foreign and the Italian population, focusing on the intensity of the flows, the concentration level of enrolments and cancellations, respectively by area of origin and destination, and lastly on the role played by populations and distances. Besides the classical measures, we adopt a gravitational model which allows to quantify the effects on internal mobility due to the dimension of the populations in the areas of origin and destination and the distance between macro-areas. The gravitational model in its most elementary formulation allowed to show that the three macro variables constitute an important not negligible component in the study of the migratory phenomenon. The estimates obtained for the years 1995, 2000 and 2005, clearly highlights the different behaviours of Italians and foreigners and a different evolution of phenomenon.