Following the routes of the former USSR women in Italy: recent trends observed integrating micro-data

Cinzia Conti, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)
Antonella Guarneri, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)

In the first decade of 21st century the presence of former USSR citizens in Italy has rapidly grown. According to the data provided by the archive of residence permits at the beginning of 2000 they were less than 24.000. At the beginning of 2009 they were almost 240 000 (more than 140 000 Ukranians) (fig.1). The regularization process (Law 189/02) had a strong effect in the growth of the regular presence coming from this area. In the first part of the paper we enlighten the most relevant demographic trends regarding these communities in the last decade. We focus our attention on three communities coming from these area particularly consistent in Italy: Moldavians, Ukranians and Russians. The observed migrant communities have peculiar characteristics and show particular socio-economic behaviours. A large part of this presence is constituted by women (fig. 2), mostly employed in the sector of family services, with a mean age higher than that registered for other foreign communities. The next step consists in applying record linkage techniques to enrich the information potential of the different sources considered and to better understand the integration paths of these women in Italy. The record linkage is used linking microdata deriving from residence permits (period 2008-2011), Social Security (years 2008-2010) and marriages celebrated in Italy (period 2007-2009). The population of interest is the cohort of former USSR women arrived for the first time in Italy in 2007. In particular we focused our attention on territorial mobility, work conditions and marriages, aspects of life towards which these communities show peculiar choices and conditions. The analysis will try to underline the relation between the studied behaviours and the individual characteristics