Italy, Country Report

Excerpts from the introduction: " While over the past two decades Italy has been the object of increasingly greater migratory flows, at the same time emigration to other countries has gradually decreased to the extent of causing a surplus in the balance of immigration from abroad. The inversion of the trend of flow has been perceived slowly in Italy and is at the origin of the delays, which have occurred both regarding statistics, and the organization of policies specifically oriented towards receiving immigrants. (...) Italian integration policy is recent and in 1998 a new law on immigration was enacted (...). Traditionally, in Italy, the state has always shown little commitment to the various social policies and actions which, on the other hand, have been carried out above all by the private social sector linked to the Catholic Church and, less frequently, to other churches or non-religious associations. The redefinition of social policies and the so-called welfare reform adopted by governments since the end of the 1980s have also benefited from the enormous development of voluntary work that has taken place in Italy coinciding with the profound crisis of traditional activity linked to political parties and trade unions or even to the post-1968 social movements."