From east to west: the former USSR citizens in Italy

Cinzia Conti, Instituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)
Nicoletta Cibella
Salvatore Strozza, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
Tiziana Tuoto, Istat

In the first decade of 21st century the presence of former USSR citizens in Italy has rapidly grown. At the beginning of 2000, according to the data provided by the archive of residence permits, they were less than 24.000 (13.000 Russians). The 2002 regularization programme has had a strong effect in the growth of their regular presence. At the beginning of 2009 they were almost 240,000 (more than 144,000 Ukrainians). They have peculiar characteristics and show particular socio-economic behaviours. A large part of this presence is constituted by women, in many cases middle aged, mostly employed in the sector of family services. In Italy Moldavians, Ukrainians and Russians are the three most numerous communities coming from this area. Our analysis is focused on these citizenships. In the first part of the paper we enlighten the most relevant demographic trends. We discuss the principal changes interested the three communities describing the specific characteristics (gender and age composition, territorial distribution, marital status, reason of the stay, etc.) and demographic behaviours (marriages, births, etc.). In a second part we study, through a longitudinal approach, the changes that have affected the cohort of regularized belonging to the three citizenships. We can distinguish two principle groups: regularized people that continue to have a residence permit in the years following the regularization and regularized people for whom is not possible to find a correspondence in the archives of residence permits. The principal differences between the two groups will be analyzed. For the first group we especially study the changes occurred during the period of observation: particular attention is paid to the internal mobility (and to marital status changes).