The overall figures below don’t give the full story. Not all immigrants are equally desirable or undesirable. Some groups are much more crime-prone than others — as just about all Italians are now acutely aware. Romanian Gypsies and Africans have, for instance, been particularly troublesome in Italy. By the same token, the very high percentage of foreigners in Switzerland is less troublesome because relatively few of the foreigners there are from troublesome groups. Most foreigners in Switzerland are of Western European origin.
Note the high concentration of foreigners in Italy’s prosperous North. That is of course the foundation of the furiously anti-immigration attitudes of the influential Northern League political party — shortly to be included in Italy’s government.
Note also that the figures below say nothing about ILLEGAL immigration
The number of foreign residents in Italy with valid residence permits has been put at just over two million, four hundred thousand (129,000 more than there were last year). Over 88 pct of them live in the Centre-North of the country, with a good quarter in Lombardy.
These are among the figures (up-dated as of first January 2007) in the initial Report on Immigration issued by Italy’s Interior Ministry and presented at the President’s palace by Minister Giuliano Amato and Under-Secretary Marcella Lucidi. The dossier contains a fair few “surprises” starting with the number of foreigners as a percentage of the whole population: at 5 pct Italy takes twelfth place in an imaginary European league table headed by Switzerland (20.2 pct), Austria (9.4 pct), Germany and Belgium (8.8 pct), Greece (8.1 pct), France (5.7 pct), Ireland (5.6 pct), Sweden and Denmark (5.4 pct), the United Kingdom (5.2 pct), Norway (5.1 pct).
There is a clear territorial division between the South (where foreign residents make up just 1.6 pct of the population) and the Centre-North (where the ratio peaks at 6.8 pct). The regions with the highest densities of immigrants are, following Lombardy, Veneto, Lazio and Emilia Romagna, but the situation within individual provinces is highly chequered, with peaks of over 10 pct, for example in Prato and Brescia.
