Elderly migrants in Italy. Individual and context characteristics

Cecilia Reynaud, Università di Roma "La Sapienza"
Lorenzo Cassata, Università di Roma "La Sapienza"
Oliviero Casacchia, Università di Roma "La Sapienza"

The past century’s big flows from Italy to America and North Europe, that needed labour force, generated afterwards considerable repatriation flows directed to Italy. In some cases people that leave their country, obliged to emigrate to find a job and better life conditions, decide, at the end of their working life, to return to their origin places, mainly at elderly ages. For this reason Italy, characterised by a strong and increasing aging process, despite the fact it is not affected by huge elderly migration streams, presents large return migration flows from abroad, differently from what happens in other countries, like United States and France, where elderly people migrate mainly for other reasons (amenity or assistance related migrations). 10% of 240 thousand changes in the place of residence by elderly people (as we consider people aged 50 and more, to catch the end of the working period) in 2001, has origin from abroad, showing how this typology is still consistent. If we observe elderly mobility, return migrations are very significant: almost 40% of changes in the place of residence by elderly people were performed by individuals, that move their place of residence from abroad to the same province where they were born. This percentage reaches more than 60% if we refer to the region of birth. Among the people that return to their province of birth, 95% are italian. It is remarkable that, on the other hand, for the rest of elderly migrants, the majority have a foreign citizenship If we separe the return migrations from the other typologies of flows, the results of a multilevel approach indicate the region as the main discriminating factor on the chance to receive a return migration, together with the Italian citizenship, as we can ascribe almost 80% of variability to the context.