There are over 900,000 students in Italy that do not have citizenship but 65 percent of whom were born in the country, according to an annual report on immigration presented on December 18 in Rome.
In the 2022-2023 school year, almost 915,000 students without Italian citizenship were enrolled in Italian schools. Of this number, 65.4 percent were born in the country, according to the 2025 report issued by the National Body for Integration Policies Coordination (ONC) and the Council for Economics and Labor (CNEL) on immigration, presented on December 18 in Rome.
"Italian students that had to repeat a year account for 7.9 percent compared with 26.4 percent of those with non-Italian citizenship," the report also noted. "Some improvements were made in recent years, but the distance with their peers with Italian citizenship remains great.
Among the students with foreign citizenship, the dropout rate is three times that of Italians (26.9 percent compared with 9 percent of holders of Italian citizenship)," the report noted.
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Over 200,000 acquired citizenship per year since 2022
As far as households are concerned, at the end of 2023 there were 2,743,134 with at least one member of the household posessing foreign citizenship: 10 percent of the total number of households in Italy.
In 40 percent of the cases, these were single-person households and in 26.5 percent composed of four or more members.
The absolute poverty rate among households with at least one member with foreign citizenship is 30.4 percent, a rate that rises to 35.2 percent for households with members holding only foreign citizenship and drops to 6.2 percent for households with members exclusively of Italian citizenship.
Since 2022, the rate of citizenship acquisition "increased in a significant manner and was once again over the symbolic threshold of 200,000, this trend continued for the 2023-2024 period."
It is estimated that over two million current residents have become Italian citizens, with the numbers of new citizens in the past decade (2015-2024) numbering over 1.6 million.
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Foreign residents increasing in Italy
As of January 1, 2025, there were an estimated 5.4 million foreign residents in Italy, 9.2 percent of the overall population, while foreigners who have acquired Italian citizenship were an estimated two million.
From 2012 to 2024, in addition, compared with a drop of 2.27 million in a population with Italian citizenship, foreign residents increased by 1.1 million: in substance, the foreign students halved the drop in the total number, the report added.
Moreover, "in the 2012-2019 period, the growth in foreigners compensated for about 60 percent of the losses suffered by the Italian population, whereas in the successive five-year period 2020-2024, there was only a 35 percent compensation" due to losses from emigration of Italians from the country.
With regards to the foreign population, Romanians are the largest community statistically, while among Eastern Europeans there is a large percentage of women.
Among them, 75.8 percent of the Ukrainian community consists of women.
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Distribution of foreigners and asylum seekers
The report shows that "the distribution of the foreign population is strongly asymmetrical, with a large concentration in the northern and central regions of the country."
Out of the total, Lombardy is the region that hosts the largest percentage of foreign residents (22.9 percent), followed by Lazio (12.2 percent), and Emilia-Romagna (10.7 percent).
In 2024 there were 151,120 asylum requests, with a 15.7 percent increase compared with 2023, when there were 130,565.
Bangladesh is the main country of origin for asylum requests, with 32,865 asylum seekers, followed by 15,595 from Pakistan, 11,740 from Egypt, and 9,985 from Morocco.
Women asylum seekers represented 19.4 percent of the total. A total of 63.8 percent of asylum seekers in 2024 were between 18 and 34, while minors accounted for 8.1 percent of the total.