Multiculturalism and Pluriculturalism in Italy

“We turn in and We look for the stranger“ William Shakespeare

The enrichment of our cultures is based on a set of fundamental freedoms and fundamental values and at its heart is that

concept of non-discrimination

The Constitution of Italy

The Constitution of Italy (Italian: Costituzione della Repubblica Italiana)

is the Supreme Law of Italy.

The Text

The Italian Constitution came into force on 1st January 1948, one century after the come into force of Statuto Albertino, the past Italian constitution.

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It is divided into three main parts: Fundamental Principles

•Part I: Rights and Duties of Citizens •Part II: Organization of the Republic •The last part is called Transitory and Final Provisions

Art. 3

All citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law, without distinction of sex, race, language, religion, political opinion, personal and social conditions.

It is the duty of the Republic to remove those obstacles of an economic or

social nature which constrain the freedom and equality of citizens […..]

Art. 6

The Republic safeguards linguistic minorities by means of appropriate measures.

Art. 7 The State and the Catholic Church are independent and

sovereign, each within its own sphere. Their relations are

regulated by the Lateran pacts […….]

Art. 8 • All religious denominations are equally free before the law. Denominations other than Catholicism have the right to self-organisation according to their own statutes, provided these do not conflict with Italian law.

Art. 10

[......]

A foreigner who, in his home country, is denied the actual exercise

of the democratic freedoms guaranteed by the Italian constitution

shall be entitled to the right of asylum under the conditions

established by law.

A foreigner may not be extradited for a political offence

Art. 11

Italy rejects war as an instrument of aggression against the freedom of other peoples and as a means for the settlement of international disputes.[....]

Ethnic Groups

Italy has been the home of various peoples: Lombards and Goths in the north;

Greeks, Saracens, and Spaniards in Sicily and the south;

Latins in and around Rome;

Etruscans and others in central Italy.

For centuries, however, Italy has enjoyed a high degree of ethnic homogeneity. The chief minority groups are the German-speaking people in the South Tyrol region and the Slavs of the Trieste area.

FROM A SOURCE TO A DESTINATION COUNTRY OF MIGRATION

As it’s well known, Italy has a long tradition of out-migration and it has begun receiving sizeable inflows of migrants only in the last decades: it’s in 1974 that the number of immigrants coming from abroad exceeded, for the first time, the amount of Italian migrants’ expatriations.

Modern Migrations

Between 1876 and 1942 nearly 19 millions of Italians went abroad, almost half of them crossed the Ocean. From 1918 and 1930 and a new decrease due to the fascist anti-emigration policy, the post-war period records a growing number of expatriations until the beginning of the Seventies, mainly directed to Germany, Belgium, France, Switzerland.

Incoming Migration

It’s since the late 1980’s that numerous migrants from Third World countries and Eastern Europe have been entering Italy.

During the late 1980s, the inflow from non-EU countries was estimated at more than 100,000 people per year

by 1999 migrants living in Italy were estimated at a number between 1,300,000 and 1,500,000 people, or about 2.3% of the domestic population.

At the start of 2011 there were 4,570,317 foreign nationals resident in Italy, the 7.5% of the country’s population

Statistics and.......

2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011

1,549,373 1,990,159 2,402,157 2,670,514 2,938,922 3,432,651 3,891,295 4,235,059 4,570,317

Total legal immigrant population, as of 1 January. Source: demo.istat.it.

These figures include more than half a million children born in Italy to foreign nationals—second generation immigrants are becoming an important element in the demographic picture—but exclude foreign nationals who have subsequently acquired Italian nationality; this applied to 65,938 people in 2010.

They also exclude illegal immigrants, the so-called clandestini, whose numbers are difficult to determine. In May 2008, the Boston Globe quoted an estimate of 670,000 for this group.

......Migration Flows to Italy