Italians’ and Foreigners’ Internal Mobility in Italy

Internal mobility in Italy, after periods of both stagnation and of intense growth, and of 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 2010, the changes of residence between Italian municipalities increased of more than 20%. Simultaneously, the contribution of the foreign population to internal migrations reached the level of 17%. 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 Italian provinces (equal to 103 units). The gravitational model in its most elementary formulation allowed to shows 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. Some refinements of the model are proposed. -