Migration flows in the Euro-Mediterranean region. The case of Italy

This chapter aims to futher our knowledge of migration, with particular reference to Italy. With the outbreak of the 2008 crisis, precisely because much of the youth work was based on flexible contracts, the unemployment rate doubled in seven years, exceeding 12% in 2013. In March 2014, 3.248 million people were out of work (almost 1.5 million more than in 2008). Among them, young people were the group most affected by the economic crisis and the loss of work: between 2008 and 2014, according to ISTAT data, the employment rate of people under 35 decreased by more than 10 percentage points - from 50.3 to 39.1%. However, after that negative peak, the employment rate of 15-34 years old has only very slightly improved to 40.8% today (2019). It is no coincidence that since 2008 Italian emigration has started to increase again. In 2014 Italian newspapers began to highlight the departure of more than 80,000 peopple from the country: “a city like Udine or La Spezia was emptied in the space of a year”. But this was just the beginning, as emigration soared in successive years.