Population replacement, social mobility and development in Italy in the twentieth century

Abstract

Many scholars have expressed alarm at the low fertility and sustained immigration that have characterized Italy in the last decade (1.3 children per woman and an increase of more than 200,000 immigrants per year). This article takes a different approach, showing how low fertility and strong migratory balances (involving migration both between Italian regions and from abroad) have enhanced the formation of human capital, facilitating family strategies of upward social mobility, the construction of a more balanced labor market, increases in income and a decline in the graying of the population. The combination of low fertility and sustained immigration, therefore, has been and still is a fundamental resource for development of the population and of Italian society, especially in central and northern Italy. The article also discusses modifications in family and immigration policies suggested by these findings.

Keywords:

• Immigration
• low fertility
• social mobility
• regional analysis
• human capital formation

Notes

1 See, for example, the introductory comments of Golini in the second and third reports of the IRP (Italian Institute for Population Research) on the Italian population (1988, 1994). See, also, Livi Bacci's comment (2001). For more general analyses of the negative effects of low fertility on western societies, see Davis et al. (1986).

2 For an overview of immigration to Italy, see the articles published in vol. 9 of this journal, 2004 (1), by Pastore (A community out of balance: nationality, law and migration politics in the history of post-unification Italy); Reyneri (Immigrants in the labour market), Colombo and Sciortino (Italian immigration: origins, nature, and evolution; Public discourse on immigration, 1969 – 2001). The concept of a ‘new demographic spring’ in Italy was developed by Dalla Zuanna and Tanturri (2004). See also the population forecasts for Emilia Romagna: http://rersas.regione.emilia-romagna.it/statexe/.

3 In addition to 650,000 regularizations, there was an increase of 100,000 immigrants on the registry rolls between January 2003 and June 2004, and on 30 June 2004, 2,300,000 foreigners were inscribed in the registry. Because in the following year, the monthly immigration figures increased by 30,000, by mid 2005 there must have been approximately 2,600,000 foreigners inscribed in the registry (www.demo.istat.it, official site of the National Institute of Statistics). Moreover, according to a survey of ISMU (a foundation for studying immigrations to Italy, sponsored by CARIPLO bank: http://www.ismu.org/), if this proportion is generalizable, in the middle of 2005 the total foreigners (legal plus illegal) must be close to 3,400,000. This estimate is very similar to one made by the Catholic social organization Caritas in its 2005 report. The number of foreigners inscribed in the registry may somewhat overestimate their actual number, because an imprecise number is not immediately struck from the rolls when they leave Italy. In any case, other indicators confirm the large increase in immigration after 1998. Between the first of January 1998 and the end of June 2004, adults with residence permits have doubled, from one to two million (www.demo.istat.it). Foreign students between the ages of six and fourteen enrolled in school have quadrupled, from 70,000 during the 1997 – 8 academic year to 280,000 in 2003 – 4, constituting more than 7 per cent of all students enrolled in the regions of the center – north (Ministry of Education: Rapporto sugli alunni di cittadinanza straniera, anno scolastico 2003 – 4, http://www.istruzione.it/mpi/pubblicazioni/2004/). In 2003 there were 34,000 births in Italy in which both parents were of foreign origin. Thirty-one thousand of these births were in the center – north, where they comprised 10 per cent of the total. Finally, the number of illegal immigrants continues to grow. For example, at the beginning of March 2005, in the Province of Padua alone, which has just a few more than one million residents, the post offices received more than 5,000 applications (actually disguised regularization requests) from new arrivals for just 1,348 positions made available by immigration law for the year 2005. For some categories and some ethnic groups, the ratio of requests to available positions is dramatic. For construction workers there were 650 requests for 130 positions. For citizens of the ex-Soviet Republic of Moldavia, there were 900 requests for 60 places (Il Mattino di Padova, Monday, 7 March 2005).

4 Over three years beginning in 2000, after a 35 year decline, fertility in the regions of north central Italy began to rise again, regaining a tenth of a point (from 1.2 to 1.3 children per woman). It is very likely that this growth will continue in the next decade for at least four reasons: (1) in Italy, as in all of the West, couples who postponed marriage or cohabitation over the past decade are now beginning to ‘make up for lost time’ (Sobotka 2004); (2) foreigners have slightly higher fertility than Italians (Sonnino 2003); (3) the diffusion of cohabitation outside of marriage hastens the date of first union and birth of the first child, and increases the total number of children (Billari and Rosina 2004); (4) the decline in poorer families with three or four children has been stopped by governmental subsidies for larger families, which were introduced in Italy in 1999 (Billari et al. 2005). In the south, however, fertility is stagnant (1.35 children per woman during the first three years of the new century) because the delay of marriage – which started later than in the north – is ongoing, immigrants are less numerous, and cohabitation less common. Despite the reproductive behavior of the south, for the reasons mentioned, it is likely that in the next few years, Italian fertility will exceed 1.5 children per woman.

5 In reality, the situation is a little more complicated. Even positive migratory balances of 200,000 per year over the next three decades will not be able to stop a progressive diminution of the working-age population, since baby-boomers (800,000 – 900,000 born each year between 1945 and 1975) will reach retirement age just when the baby-busters born after 1980 (500,000 – 600,000 per year) will enter the job market. Moreover, the new immigrants bring with them a number – albeit somewhat contained – of elderly relatives. Nevertheless, because the proportion of Italian women who remain in the work force after they give birth continues to grow and the retirement age is slowly increasing, immigration figures like those hypothesized should be enough to avoid dramatic shortages in the labor force.

6 The old-fashioned demographic paradigm had populations with permanently negative natural balances, compensated for by continuous immigration. The most studied examples are the populations of many cities where high mortality and a low birth rate (the result of a low marriage rate) were compensated for by continuous arrivals from the surrounding countryside or even from very distant areas. For an analytical overview and bibliographical references, see Wilson and Airey (1999). Venice is an interesting example where this situation persisted for centuries (Beltrami 1954).

7 The comparison with Australia lets us show that population replacement in northwest Italy depended on immigration even greater than that of a country considered by all as a traditional destination for emigrants from other countries. Moreover, although Australia is 140 times bigger than northwest Italy, it is demographically comparable (with a population of 20 million today versus 15.5 million in northwest Italy) and has roughly the same per capita income.

8 Actually, this process began many years earlier. With the first signs of development, some areas of Italy began to attract consistent influxes of people, in the same decades when fertility was beginning its decline. The ‘hunger for workers’ was sated by people born and raised in other areas of Italy. In the 1881 census, for the first time the Direzione Generale della Statistica (the General Administration of Statistics) classified residents according to their area of birth. With some surprise the statisticians of that period noted that 52 per cent of the Milan population had been born elsewhere (Dirstat, Relazione generale del censimento del 1881: 33 – 4). In the successive decades, the process of urbanization continued, not stopped even by laws passed to prevent the exodus from rural areas (Treves 1976) and far fewer children continued to be born in the cities than in rural areas (Livi Bacci 1977).

9 For a more detailed proof, see Dalla Zuanna (2004).

10 For the Italian cohort born between 1930 and 1949, there was neither required schooling through age fourteen nor a unified junior high school.

11 The strong association between number of siblings and educational level is also confirmed for other Italian regions. For example, in the Veneto, among those born between 1930 and 1949 to poorly educated parents, 52 per cent of only children have at least a junior high school diploma, compared to only 23 per cent among those with three or more siblings. This association is equally strong in all Italian regions, even when shorter cohorts of ten or 15 year periods are considered.

12 Istat, Annuario di Contabilita' Nazionale, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1974.

13 A recent doctoral thesis has evaluated the academic outcomes of second generation Italian immigrants based on the places to which they moved: Switzerland, France, Australia and northern Italy. Controlling for variations resulting from the structure of the population at the place of origin, in the three foreign countries, the second generation Italians born in the 1950s (1960s in Australia), obtained educational levels slightly better than or equal to those of their native-born age mates. This does not hold for the older second generations, which are relatively disadvantaged. The positive results for children of Italians are even more evident if the comparison is limited to the working class. Finally, in the regions of the northwest, the children of immigrants coming from other center – north regions or children of ‘mixed’ couples (northwest and another region) have educational levels quite similar to those of the native born children, while children with two southern parents have had difficulty acquiring high school and university degrees, especially if they too were born in the south (Impicciatore 2005).

14 Between 1997 and 2001, the per capita income of people with little education in Italy was only 57 per cent of that of persons with a high school degree. The same indicator was 69 per cent in the USA, 80 per cent in Germany, 84 per cent in France, and 88 per cent in Sweden (OECD, Education at a Glance, 2003).

15 For extended analysis of the USA and comparative analysis of rich countries, see Blake (1985, 1989). For comparative analysis of poor countries, see Lloyd (1994). This result can seem in partial contradiction to the traditional image of ‘familist’ Italy, in which a larger number of siblings offers a larger network of acquaintances, support, assistance, and opportunity. Actually, there is no contradiction. Parents and children in a large family can be joined by the closest bonds of reciprocal solidarity, but that is not sufficient to overcome the wide gap of resources available compared to families with fewer children in a social context where the links between generations are strong in each case, and where the construction of human capital is concentrated in the first two or three decades of life. Moreover, having very few (1 – 2) children can be considered ‘familist’ behavior, because the couple ‘sacrifices’ the quantity of their offspring on the altar of their ‘quality’, and – coherently – is willing to invest their resources so as to outclass those guaranteed by the mutual solidarity of siblings (Dalla Zuanna and Micheli 2004).

16 I quote from two works which have had a great influence on the interpretation of the decline of births in rich countries today: ‘As a motive for keeping the size of family small, the fear of unemployment is probably far less important than the ambitions of parents for their children … . There is a powerful incentive to limit the size of family in the interest of the children … . [To increase fertility] it is necessary to ensure that the member of the three or four child family is not handicapped in the race on account of lack of equipment, as compared with the member of one or two child family … . In part the low fertility of the higher income classes is due to the possibility of what amounts to the purchase of positions for children; for the fewer the children, the more money there is for expenditure in this direction’ (Carr-Saunders 1936, ch. XVII: ‘The small family problem’); ‘During this period [i.e., since the late 18th century in France and the early 19th century in the rest of Western Europe] Western society was shaken by a veritable revolution in sensibility, a revolution as important as the French Revolution or the Industrial Revolution. Affectivity became centered about the family and the children. … It turned inward upon itself and organized itself in terms of the children and their future. … This sort of planning implied the desire to ensure that the children's economic and social status would be superior to that of their parents. Thus, birth control was linked with social mobility. … To my mind, seeing that one's children got ahead in a climate of social mobility was the deep motivation behind birth control’ (Aries 1980: 646 – 7).

17 Hirshman (1994); Wilson and Airey (1999).

18 See the above-cited work of Coleman and Rowthorn (2004), which cites numerous works in support of the pernicious effect of immigration on development and the works of Borjas (1994), Dolado et al. (1994), Zak et al. (2002) and Sartor (2004).

19 For the expanded results of the empirical analysis relating to all the pre-expansion countries of the EU, see Dalla Zuanna and Tanturri (2004). This does not mean that immigrants do not compete with the most disadvantaged social classes, as recent studies of the USA and the EU have shown: for an overview, see Coleman and Rowthorn (2004), and for the USA, see also Kim and Sakamoto (2005). However, Venturini (2004) has shown, to the contrary, that in northern Italy during the second half of the twentieth century, immigrations have positively influenced the probability of native-born workers finding jobs. In general, it could be useful to distinguish between short-term effects and medium- and long-term effects. In the short term, it is likely that unskilled immigrants can be competitive with the weakest of the locals, ‘stealing’ their jobs and compromising their earnings. The economists cited in the article by Coleman and Rowthorn have focused primarily on this aspect, without fully considering the long-term effects. For example, in Italy in recent years, the availability of an immigrant labor force has created wealth by boosting economic sectors which had had a shortage of manpower: in some branches of agriculture requiring high intensity work, in some important industrial sectors like the leather tanning industry; in some services like domestic work. Moreover, as has been oft repeated, the immigrants have strongly slowed the aging of the population, with beneficial effects on the sustainability of the social security system. The mechanisms described in the preceding paragraph are an example of positive medium and long-term effects of immigration on the system of population replacement.

20 Obviously, history does not repeat itself in this sphere either, and similar behavioral and institutional mechanisms will not necessarily cause the same social outcomes for this new wave of immigration as they did for the 1950s and 1960s. The success of the integration process – or more correctly the ‘fusion process’, because the meeting of two populations always gives rise to something entirely new (LeBras 2001) – depends on varying factors. We have seen that in contrast to what happened to Italian immigrants in France, Australia and Switzerland, the children of southern Italian immigrants to the northwest did not succeed in reaching, ceteribus paribus, the education levels and the social class of their native-born age cohort. It is hard to predict whether the children of recent immigrants to Italy from poor countries will have a better fate. Certainly, the outcome of their migratory investment is also linked to policy choices.

21 For a more general examination of the motivations that can justify the adoption of measures favorable to more numerous families, see Dalla Zuanna (1999). See also the comments of Colombo (1988).