Integration of migrants in Italy: A simple general and objective measure

Abstract

Measuring migrants’ integration into host societies is a challenging task as, in general, measuring any social behavior and social phenomena. The task is affected by many specific problems related to the definition of the objective of study and the impact of subjective evaluations in the construction of an index. Our study aims to provide a measure of integration as much as possible general and objective. More in details, first, we consider some different general aspects of the integration problem related to migrants’ polarization, cultural diversification, social stability, integration in the labor market. Second, we aggregate them in a synthetic linear index, which is rather objective since the weights are computed by only considering the statistical properties of our dataset, i.e. choosing those weights that minimize the information loss in terms of data variances/co-variances