I processi di immigrazione: dall'illegalità alla regolarizzazione

Illegality has always been a core topic in the debate on foreign presence in Italy, but rarely it dealt with the necessary awareness about its real consistence, the main structural features and the different impact that it has taken (and still assumes) at local level. Apart from the recurrent -and often ideological and instrumental-assessments from disparate sources, we can say that, while in the early 90's there was in Italy almost one illegal every two migrants, towards the end of the same decade the proportion declined to about one in four and after the regularization started in late 1998 (and finished about two years later) it can be assumed that the incidence of illegality was further lowered till the "physiological" level of 100-150 thousand units. It doesn’t mean, however, that since then the phenomenon of illegal presence has stopped to these low levels. After the reductive effects of the regularization were exhausted, the irregular component has in fact taken to grow consistently, even for the attractive force arising from the prospect of a new "amnesty", as just discussed at the beginning of 2001. In fact, at time immediately preceding the last regularization of 2002 it was assumed from a minimum of 541 thousand to a maximum of 730 000 illegal foreigners living in Italy, within a total foreign population whose estimations range from 2.2 million to 2.5 million units, of which 90% coming from the so called “high migratory pressure countries (HMPc’s)” and 700-750 thousand referred to the subset of the main three countries: Morocco, Albania and Romania. As regards the legality path of foreign migrants living in Italy, the analysis recently carried out with reference to outcomes of the last three regularization since the '90s show that the vast majority of beneficiaries of these measures were never been in possession of a valid residence permit. This leads to say that the amnesties occurred in our country have normally focused on different individuals from time to time. The fact that nearly 600,000 of 1,341,000 permits in force on 1st January 2000 (of which approximately 1.15 million referred to HMPc’s citizens) concerned migrants settled in previous amnesties, that left their illegality in the course of these last 10-15 years, give support to the conviction that such a path to legality will have contributed to the grow of legal foreigners in Italy almost as much as the official regular flows did. Therefore, if just three years ago, we can show that a legal migrant on two acquired its status through the process of an amnesty, we must certainly take into account that the approximately 700 thousand applications submitted in late 2002 –according to the new regularization from the decree 195/2002 (as to Law 189/02 the so-called "Bossi-Fini Law")- will increase the universe of foreigners living in Italy with a further massive input of individuals who experienced the painful and often obliged process of "transition to the legality."