Immigrazione straniera e criminalità in Italia

Foreign Immigration and Crime in Italy The migration-crime link has become a major social and political issue in European countries. In Italy, it has generated a hot debate, based, however, on emotions and ideological biases, rather than scientific studies. This situation is the result of both the lack of interest of the Italian public institutions in a scientific analysis of crime problems and the diffusion of an anti-quantitative approach to the issue of social control. The present paper addresses this issue by means of a relative index of incrimination, which generates a more intuitive measure of the immigrant contribution to crime. The index output shows that this contribution is in Italy much larger than the immigrant share of the resident population and concerns all the most common and serious crimes. Immigrants’ contribution to crime, concurrently, does not seem to be independent of their legal and socio-economic conditions, since it is not the same for immigrants and foreigners, nor is it constant over time and under different circumstances. Moreover, the large contribution to crime made by immigrants in Italy suggests a relationship with the host country’s structural features, such as its high level of unemployment, inequality, corruption and labour market rigidities, and its limited economic freedom.