Marriages of women from former-USSR in Italy… a step towards integration?

Antonella Guarneri, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)
Cinzia Conti, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)
Giancarlo Gualtieri, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)
Rottino Fabio Massimo, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)

In the first decade of 21st century the presence of former-USSR citizens in Italy has rapidly grown. According to the data provided by the archive of residence permits at the beginning of 2000 they were less than 24.000. At the beginning of 2013 they were more than 430 000 (about 225 000 Ukrainians). The regularization process (Law 189/02) had a strong effect on the growth of the regular presence coming from this area. A large part of this presence is constituted by women, mostly employed in the sector of family services, with a mean age higher than that registered for other foreign communities. In Italy in 2012, mixed marriages in which one partner is Italian and the other is foreign amount to 20 764; around 8 out of 10 of these mixed marriages regard foreign brides. Among the citizenships mainly involved in this typology there are, after the Romanians, the ones belonging to the area of Eastern Europe and former USSR. The Ukrainian brides account for nearly the 10% of the marriages with foreign bride and Italian groom. The general aim of this contribution is to enlighten the most relevant demographic trends regarding the Moldavian, Russian and Ukrainian communities in the last decade. The population of interest is the cohort of former-USSR women arrived for the first time in Italy in 2007. The record linkage is used linking microdata deriving from residence permits, Social Security and marriages celebrated in Italy. The linkages allow to better defining the profile of these communities in Italy also in a longitudinal perspective. Descriptive and multivariate analysis will be carried out to enlighten the differential characteristics of the brides. In particular the application of regression models let us shed light to the relation among individual (and migratory) characteristics and some relevant behaviours.