AN INNOVATIVE INTERPRETATION OF THE LEVEL OF CRIMINALITY OF FOREIGNERS LEGALLY PRESENT IN ITALY
AN INNOVATIVE INTERPRETATION OF THE LEVEL OF CRIMINALITY OF FOREIGNERS LEGALLY PRESENT IN ITALY

Summary/Abstract: An Innovative Interpretation of the Level of Criminality of Foreigners Legally Present in Italy. The article aims to explore two considerations: the heightened concern among Italians regarding crime and the tendency to believe the proportion of crimes they commit is abnormal compared to their incidence among the resident population. The paper refers to some studies conducted with Franco Pittau, which were included in the annual reports of the IDOS Study and Research Center on immigrant deviance and at the International Interdisciplinary Conference On Immigration. The inspiring reasons for the studies on immigrant crime were fundamentally two: one social (Italians’ fear) and the other methodological (the failure to take into account all the statistical data essential for a correct assessment). The paper will present the evolution of the debate on criminality among regular immigrants from the 1990s to the present, a period in which Italy became a country of mass immigration. This study does not entirely agree with the conclusions of two well-known sociologists of those decades in that they believe that regularly resident immigrants are involved, proportionally, in a much higher number of reports compared to their impact on the resident population. With a different statistical methodology, also evaluating not unknown elements and adding others, we can free the legal immigrant from this criminal connotation, through an approach capable of promoting greater openness among Italians on the issue. of integration.

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