The number of stay permits released to non-EU citizens in Italy in 2020, the year of the COVID-19 pandemic, dropped by 40% on the previous year, according to a report released by the Italian national statistics bureau ISTAT on October 22. Italy had not issued so few stay permits in the last decade, though the number was down by a little over a quarter between 2018 and 2019.

Meanwhile, the number of new Italians rose by more than 4%. Nearly all new citizenship applications (90%) were from non-EU citizens, ISTAT said in the report "Non-EU citizens in Italy. Years 2020-2021".

According to the report, the decrease in residence permits was caused partly by restrictions on movement linked to the pandemic. It was also due to a delay in the issuing of permits, which was the result of a significant increase in migrant arrivals in Italy in the second half of 2020.

More foreigners acquire Italian citizenship

In 2020, ISTAT said, Italy granted about 106,500 new residence permits to non-EU citizens.

Large decreases in the number of permits issued occurred in the areas of education (-58%) and asylum (-51%). Slightly fewer non-EU nationals already living in Italy applied for residence permits than did so the previous year. This was partly due to the larger number of people acquiring Italian citizenship.

In 2020, 131,803 foreigners, most from non-EU countries, acquired Italian citizenship. There are on average 29 "new citizens" for every 100 foreigners, and the number is much higher for certain groups, the report said. For example, around half of Albanians in Italy have Italian citizenship.

Drop in permits issued for education, asylum

As of the start of 2020, there were over 1.2 million people living in Italy who were born with the citizenship of a non-EU country and subsequently acquired Italian citizenship. Nearly three-quarters of all new citizens resided in the regions of Lombardy, Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, Piedmont, Lazio and Tuscany.

Last year, far fewer residence permits were issued to certain nationalities: for citizens from the United States, China and Ukraine, the number was down by around 50%. The main decreases were in the numbers of permits granted to study, which dropped by just over 58% on 2019, and permits for asylum, which were down by just over 51%.

In 2020 a total of 13,467 new permits were registered for requests for asylum and international protection in Italy (12.6% of the total of the new residence permits released). The biggest drop - over 80% - was among Indian and Ukrainian citizens. The country with the highest number of migrants who reached Italy in 2020 seeking protection was Pakistan (3,683 permits), followed by Nigeria and Bangladesh. Family permits, the main reason for entry recorded in Italy, dropped by 38.3% on the previous year, covering almost 59% of new permits issued.