Il popolo dei regolarizzati

The fact that the people of foreign immigrants who experienced the hard and painfully administrative procedure in order to get a legal status, is still without an adequate characterization using traditional statistical sources, does not mean that it is entirely in shadow. There are, in fact, some attempts to develop interesting paths of knowledge, including activating and enhancing alternative to the official statistical system. An approach in this sense is precisely what underlies the present work, whose main goal is to provide a report about the population of regularized and to compare its image and the elements of differentiation that may distinguish it from those who have always been regular. On the problem of the sources, the statistical material that will be referenced here is largely due to the surveys conducted by the ISMU Foundation in the framework of the Observatory on the foreign presence in Lombardy; an original research field that started in 1996 within the city of Milan and progressively was extended to other provinces of Lombardy up to and including, since 2001, the whole region. The high sample size, about 8000 cases annually at the regional level, and the statistical methodology that characterize the data collection (the Centre Sampling Method) ensure the representativeness as to the corresponding universe that, however limited, is nevertheless related to the region that is a leader as regards foreign migration in Italy. A region that, according to the latest assessment (Blangiardo 2004), collects about 600,000 individuals from the so called “high migratory pressure countries (HMPc’s)”. This paper, despite the above limits of a local vision of the universe object of interest, takes in consideration and enhances a rich set of unusual information concerning the people of regularized, so that can offer some original insights that can help us to escape from the trap of recurring stereotypes that too often clouds the perception of a reality continuously in change.