Surveying immigrants in Southern Europe:Spanish and Italian strategies incomparative perspective

Italy and Spain, as countries of recent immigration and high irregularity rates, havestruggled to adapt their statistical system, especially their population registers, toadequately reflect the presence of an increasing number of immigrants in their territory.The population registers of the two countries have adapted differently to these changingrealities: Spain introduced significant improvements in Padrón which have increased itscoverage and accuracy. This is still not the case in Italy, making it necessary to resort tonon-random sampling methods. The paper discusses the methodological implicationsof these differences and evaluates different methodological solutions based on bothrandom and non-random sampling methods in both countries