There are four million Italian residents overseas, at least 60 million born in other countries and those who refer to Italy are even more. This is the result of the third report on Italians in the world presented in Rome by the Fondazione Migrantes, which underlines how the presence of Italians overseas also means language and culture courses. 34, 689 were the ones promoted by the Italian Foreign Office in the school year 2006/2007 with a total of 650 thousand enrolled, while the Dante Alighieri society has 400 groups in Italy and overseas, centres for cultural assistance, libraries and reading rooms, TV programmes, with more than 200,000 students.

Among the 3,734,428 Italians who are resident overseas, explained the report of the Fondazione Migrantes, only more than half (59%) emigrated, moving away from Italy. More than one third instead were born overseas (34.3 %) and 2.5% applied to Aire to obtain the Italian citizenship, which usually happens by birth overseas. So the belief that Italians overseas and immigration are the same thing is not true.

Translated by Chiara Nunnari from John Milton Institute