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Chinese Immigration to Italy and Economic Relations with the Homeland: A Multiscalar Perspective

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Native and Immigrant Entrepreneurship

Abstract

The chapter characterizes the Chinese migrant economic integration in Italy in three ways. First, in a globalized world, migration flows are not discrete processes, but create permanent international links through different economic channels. We identify investments, remittances, and international trade as examples of these ties. Second, migrant integration occurs at different territorial scales, with the local level being the most interesting. Chinese firms and migrant remittances are embedded in a local context, and follow the geography of territorial change. Third and most important, liabilities and outsidership are ambivalent. The statistical analysis shows that Chinese communities would not have filled the gap left in Italian industrial districts by the industrial decline in the textile sector without their connection to their homeland. The growth of second-generation migrants and their embeddedness in the local communities of the receiving country is strategic, drawing a picture of a transilient migrant community.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Third Italy refers to an area of the country characterized by a production model different from the large industries in North-West Italy and the under-industrialized Southern Italy. Hence, North-Eastern and Central Italy—the Third Italy—is characterized by clusters of small and medium size businesses. That is, industrial districts specializing in one or more traditional manufacturing sectors (see Bagnasco 1977; Becattini 2000).

  2. 2.

    The percentage of residents is calculated using data from the Municipal Register. Data on Chinese-owned firms are from the Chamber of Commerce Register.

  3. 3.

    Income data are from 2006, and self-employment data are from 2008 (source: Eurostat).

  4. 4.

    Italy underestimates some of its official figures. For example, the Bank of Italy only has detailed information for bank transfers over €12,500 (Giangaspero 2009). This gives rise to estimation problems, because of the small and repeated transactions that are used to avoid suspicion in the illegal or gray economy. This effects the statistical reliability of the available data (Fondazione ICSA 2012). Additionally, there are probably underestimations in the money flowing from origin to destination countries, because this money is difficult to track. The bilateral remittance matrix of the World Bank shows that the Italy-China inflows are one hundred times larger than the Italy-China outflows (see: http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/migrationremittancesdiasporaissues/brief/migration-remittances-data).

  5. 5.

    The same applies to the sending regions in China. However, given the quite delimited territorial origin of the Chinese in Italy—mainly from Zhejiang, and particularly from Wenzhou—the national data on China are a sufficiently satisfactory proxy of the sending region.

  6. 6.

    We controlled for the incidence of Chinese residents, the rate of concentration of Chinese residents, the per capita general income of the province, and the demographic size. None of the variables was statistically correlated to the per capita average remittance.

  7. 7.

    To classify the economic activities we used ATECO 2007 (at a 2-digit level), which is the Italian version of the NACE Rev. 2 economic classification system. The textile industry is classified as NACE 13.

  8. 8.

    Chinese population figures for the under 18s are not available at a county level. Therefore, we used census data from 2011 and made a linear interpolation to 2013.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Urbino, Italy

    Eduardo Barberis

  2. ISTAT, Rome, Italy

    Alberto Violante

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  1. Eduardo Barberis
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  2. Alberto Violante
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Correspondence to Eduardo Barberis .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics and Management, University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Simone Guercini

  2. Department of Economics and Management, University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Gabi Dei Ottati

  3. School of Social Sciences, The University of Western Australia School of Social Sciences, CRAWLEY, West Australia, Australia

    Loretta Baldassar

  4. Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Caulfield East, Victoria, Australia

    Graeme Johanson

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Barberis, E., Violante, A. (2017). Chinese Immigration to Italy and Economic Relations with the Homeland: A Multiscalar Perspective. In: Guercini, S., Dei Ottati, G., Baldassar, L., Johanson, G. (eds) Native and Immigrant Entrepreneurship . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44111-5_3

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