Immigrant integration. Sociological theory and core indicators

Today immigration is one of the main topics of public debate not only at national level. A effective management and the development of adequate social policies also pass from the assessment of the integration processes, but integration is a complex, dynamic, time-varying concept in space, linked to historical-political circumstances and to the characteristics assumed by the phenomenon migratory. The definitions change, depending on the theoretical reference model that, in general, can adopt a unilateral point of view, so the "burden" of integration passes fundamentally from the immigrant's ability to adapt (International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, 1949), or bilateral, which reads the integrative process, instead, as a reciprocal exchange (Natale, Strozza, 1997; Zincone, 2000). The intervention intends to reconstruct the birth of the concept in the US academic context - in which it has gradually replaced terms like absorption (Eisenstadt, 1975), acculturation (Gans 2007), inclusion (Parsons, 1967), incorporation (Portes, 1989), assimilation (Gordon, 1964) - and in that European - where it became a policy issue when migration took on the characteristics of a permanent project (Brubaker 1989; 1992) - to then review the literature on the systems of most used integration indicators (with particular attention to the Italian and European environment). The objective is to verify the adequacy and the estate in the face of a migration phenomenon that poses new and urgent challenges: from the problems of comparability between migratory experiences to the question of the second and third generations - real litmus tests of the validity of the integration processes - up to the question of citizenship.