According to the latest statistics Italy is a country with a resident foreign population of more than 5 million, around 8,3% of the total population (1st January 2017).

Over the last years the migration pattern in Italy has completely changed: the inflows of migrants are decreasing and have a complete different composition with a growing component of asylum seekers and person under protection. In 2007 the work permits represented the 56,1% of the total inflows. In 2015 the work permits represent only the 9,1% of the new inflows. At the same time the permits for asylum and humanitarian reasons accounted for the 3,7% in 2007 and for 28,2% in 2015. These changes have consequences on characteristics, behaviors and needs of new arrived people and on the governance of migration flows.

At the same time Italy continues to deal with the integration of migrants arrived between 90’s and the early 2000s. There is a growing number of foreigners that acquire the Italian citizenship. In four years, from 2012 to 2016, they have more than tripled: 65.383 acquisitions of citizenship have been registered in 2012 and 201.591 in 2016.

So we are in a phase of transition, considered ‘epochal’ from a lot of experts of migration studies. This is also a new challenge for Statistics, called to provide adequate governance tools for an increasingly complex phenomenon.

The paper illustrates the steps to arrive from a system of different sources of data towards an integrated system to measure not only migrations but also social integration and the new challenges offered by the integrated system of administrative data,continuous census and social surveys.