A Statistical Mechanics Approach to Immigrant Integration in Emilia Romagna (Italy)

Abstract

Integration phenomena are social processes among human beings that take place every day when an autochthone population is experiencing the arrival of new immigrants. Although being a rising phenomenon (involving now over one billion people according to United Nations) which questions societies and policy-makers all over the world, numerical measurements capable to give robust insights over the way immigrant integration occurs are still far from what is usually considered an affordable standard in mathematical and physical sciences. Basing our analysis on previous seminal works, we follow here a statistical physics approach to the analysis of immigrant integration. In specific, we consider a large dataset collected by the Emilia Romagna region office of statistics (Italy), containing information over all marriages occurred amid the regional population during a sixteen years span, from 1995 to 2010. We define as quantifier of integration the percentage of marriages with spouses of mixed origin and we perform several analyses over the dataset, including binning and data fitting. The final outcome consists in an emerging pattern: quantifier’s average measurements align around a square root fit when considered with respect to a suitable function of the immigrant density. The theoretical interpretation we offer is that such result agrees with a suitable version of the Curie-Weiss model used in statistical mechanics to describe ferromagnetisms. More explicitly, immigrants living in Emilia Romagna municipalities seem to present mainly imitative behavior’s phenomena in making social actions for integration. The result emerged with Emilia Romagna data complies with previous works concerning similar data coming from Spain.