The Long Journey of Italian Statistics on International Migration

The last 150 years of Italian history include all the main steps of the evolution of a national migration system. In fact, for almost a century Italy had been one of the most important countries of emigration in the world, while nowadays it has become one of the favorite destinations of international migration flows. The paper is an attempt to describe the main changes in Italian statistics on international migration, highlighting the relations between these changes and changes in migration policies and migration trends.