The Numbers Game

Attempts to estímate the numbers of immigrants in Southern European countries are subject to extremely wide margins of error.

Several reasons account for this. The first is the lack of statistical ac- counting systems in the four countries themselves: as noted above, these countries are more accustomed to monitoring outflows of their own emigrants than inflows of immigrants. Henee their data on immigration, both stocks and flows, are highly approximate, often with widely different estimates coming from different sources within the same country. A second fundamental difficulty is the high level of clandestine migration: by definition this escapes official channels and goes unrecorded, at least for a time. Post facto estimates of clandestine immigration may be made as a result of regularisation programmes such as those which took place in Spain in 1985 and 1991, Italy in 1986 and 1990, and Portugal in 1992. Thirdly, there are many different types of immigrant: as well as the dominant groups of (legal or illegal) migrant workers from Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe there are high-status groups from Northern Europe and North America, some of whom are highly clustered in re- drement enclaves of coastal distriets like the Algarve and the Costa del Sol, returning migrants (or the descendants of emigrants) bearing the nationality of the country they settled in, 'ethnic immigrants' such as the Pontian Greeks who are rapidly settling in Greece from

the former Soviet Union, other refugees and asylum-seekers from various parts of the world, and returning colonial settlers such as the estimated 700,000 Portuguese-nationality who resettled in Portugal in the 1970s in the wake of decolonisation in Angola and Mozambique.

These difficulties mean that, to be realistic, our estimates have to be approximate and based on broadly-specified criteria. Many sources in the late 1980s quote a figure of 2 million immigrants in the four countries. Already in 1987, Simón estimated nearly 2 million, made up of 1 million in Italy, 650,000 in Spain and about 100,000 each in Portugal and Greece (Simón 1987:284). Of these figures, the Spanish may have been an over-estimate, the Greek figure certainly an un- derestimate. The same author went on to point out that only 655,000 were legal immigrants (for this group the estímate can of course be more precise), most of whom came from Northern Europe and North America and included mainly professional and skilled workers as well as many students and retired persons. This left the majority clandestine or illegal immigrants: upward of 700,000 in Italy, roughly 450,000 in Spain, 50,000 in Portugal, and 'at least 40,000' (but prob- ably a very much higher number) in Greece. Not only is there a di- versity of types of migrant, as noted above, but there is also tremen- dous variety in the less-developed source countries from which the mostly clandestine labour migrants come: from the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, from "black" Africa, from many countries in South and East Asia, from Latin America, and from the newly-liberated countries of Eastern Europe.

If Simon's (1987) estímate of 2 million has some validity, the current figure must be around 3 million, given the continued growth of im- migration, both legal and especially illegal, over the past ten years.

Our estímate here is partly based on the Italian trend data, which we shall present shortly; the Italian case is important because it repre- sents approximately half the quantity of immigration into Southern Europe and is a sort of 'pioneer' for the other countries. Moreover our estímate of 3 million for the mid-1990s is not out of line with other indicators. For instance Heyden (1991:287) quoted ISOPLAN estimates of 2.7-3.0 million (presumably for circa 1990) for the total foreign population of the four countries, made up (at that stage) of an almost equal división between legal and illegal immigrants. The balance between legal and illegal migrants changes over time

according to the pattern of arrivals (illegals tend to arrive in surges), deportations and regularisations.

Other estimates are reviewed by Salt, Singleton and Hogarth (1994).

Eurostat data on stocks of foreign nationals in 1990 give 781,000 for Italy, 484,000 for Spain, 229,000 for Greece and 108,000 for Portugal.

These figures, totaling to 1.6 million overall, exelude unregistered immigrants and are largely made up of migrants from more devel- oped countries.26 Eurostat-recorded stocks of foreign labour in the same year give equally low estimates: 381,300 for Italy, 85,400 for Spain, 36,900 in Portugal and 23,200 in Greece: a total immigration labour forcé of 526,800. Here too we are dealing largely with fully regularised migrant workers from developed countries. This is borne out by the low activity rate produced by relating the two Eurostat to- tals (for labour forcé and total legal foreign population), which is 32.9 percent; most of the Third World immigrants are economically active because they arrive without family members. Meanwhile 1LO esti- mates for 'illegally present non-nationals' in Italy and Spain for 1991 are 600,000 and 300,000 respectively (quoted in Salt, Singleton and Hogarth 1994:185). If these estimates are grossed up to take account of the high levéis of illegal immigration in Portugal and (especially) Greece, and then added to the Eurostat figure of legally present im- migrants (1.6 million), then we arrive cióse to our 3 million figure mentioned earlier.

The calculation can be further refined by some estimates for the in- dividual countries, as follows. At the same time we can begin to get an appreciation of the diversity of migrant origins.

The Italian national statistics ageney ISTAT produced an estímate of 1,144,000 immigrants in 1989; of this total 963,000 were from non-EC states, 880,000 were from less developed countries and 580,000 were illegal. Given the known (but unquantifiable) increase in numbers of immigrants in Italy since 1989—by 31 December 1993 there were nearly 1 million legally resident foreigners plus an unknown, but

26In fact a Council of Europe report for the same year recorded that only a quarter of the legally registered immigrants in the four countries were from Third World origins.

Council of Europe, Report on the New Countries of Immigration, Parliamentary Assembly, Strasbourg, April 1990, Document 6211, quoted in Salt, Singleton and Hogarth (1994:187).

certainly considerable, quantity of illegals—the Italian figure for 1995 could easily be as high as 1.5 million. Of the four countries, Italy is notable for the greatest variety of immigrant nationalities. The largest community, the Moroccans, have less than 10 percent of the total foreign population; 12 different nationalities need to be summed to reach 50 percent of the total and 27 to reach 75 percent.

The major groups comprise countries in the developed world (USA, Germany, Great Britain), in Eastern Europe (ex-Yugoslavia, Albania, Poland), North Africa (Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt), the Horn of Africa (Somalia, Ethiopia-Eritrea), West Africa (Senegal, Cape Verde, Nigeria), the Middle East (Irán), South Asia (India, Pakistán, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka), the Far East (the Philippines, China) and Latin America (Brazil, Perú, Colombia, the Dominican Republic).

Further details follow in Section 3.4 of this paper.

Greece probably has, proportionate to its own population (10.1 mil- lion), more immigrants than any of the other South European coun- tries. In one sense this is surprising since it is, on some indicators such as GDP per capita, the poorest of the four countries. Estimates of the foreign population seem to vary widely. Official estimates of the total foreign population show a rapid expansión from around 200,000 in the early 1980s to nearly 500,000 in the early 1990s (quoted in Salt, Singleton and Hogarth 1994:193). These figures include large numbers of people from developed countries who are married to Greeks or resident for work purposes; they also embrace some ethnic Greeks (from the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Turkey, etc.) who may even- tually become naturalised. By contrast the total stock of legal foreign workers is only 40,000. Not to be outdone, the Ministry of Public Order has recently published an estímate of 500,000 additional illegal immigrants (Salt, Singleton and Hogarth 1994:32), but this seems ex- cessive: perhaps 300,000 is closer to the mark. Aside from advanced country groups (the largest are from the USA, Great Britain and Germany), Greece's main immigrant worker nationalities are the Albanians and the Poles (more than 100,000 of each), followed by much smaller but nevertheless significant communities from Egypt, the Philippines, Pakistán and various African countries.

In Spain the number of legally resident foreigners rose from 65,000 in the early 1960s to 160,000 in 1970 and exceeded 400,000 in 1990.

However, as in Greece, a substantial proportion of the legal residents are Northern Europeans who have chosen to live, work and often re-

tire in Spain (cf. Warnes 1991). The unknown quantity, as ever, is the size of the clandestine element. Simón estimated 450,000 in 1987, the ILO 300,000 in 1991 (presumably before the regularisation pro- gramme of that year); other recent estimates reported by Salt, Singleton and Hogarth (1994:191) range between 170,000 and 260,000, thus increasing the legal total by about 50-60 percent.27 Regarding origins, Spain follows the Italian model, with a wide geo- graphical spread but, within that spread, there is a greater concentra- tion on a number of key nationalities. Thus Moroccans domínate amongst the North Africans and are the leading group overall, Poles domínate amongst East Europeans, and Filipinos amongst Asia mi- grants. Compared to Italy and Greece immigration to Spain has a much stronger Latin American bias, for obvious reasons of language and colonial history. Germans and British domínate the retirement migrations to the coast and islands.

For Portugal the number of legally recorded foreign residents was 114,000 in 1991. Significant growth in the number of foreigners be- gan in the 1970s, when most came from the African colonies; after 1980 the flows diversified. As in the other three countries, there are substantial and difficult-to-estimate numbers of illegal immigrants, most of whom enter on visitor or business visas and then overstay, hoping to legalise themselves subsequently. The most recent estí- mate of the illegal population is 80,000 (1992). Much more than the other three countries, Portugal's immigrants are defined by colonial ties: the main groups are from Cape Verde (26 percent), Brazil (12 percent), Angola (5 percent) and Guinea-Bissau (4 percent). Nearly all the African immigrants are from Portuguese-speaking countries.

The main North European settlers are the British (8 percent) reflect- ing both long-established commercial ties and recent retirement migration. The illegal migrant groups reflect a mixture of former colonial (Brazil) and new origins (India, Pakistán).

27

The Spanish figures are a little perplexing. If Simon's estimate of 650,000 for 1987 is of a roughly correct order of magnitude, and if numbers of immigrants continued to grow in the late 1980s and early 1990s (there is some support in the Spanish data for annual increases of the order of 10 percent), then the final total by 1995 could be of the order of 1 million.