Romanian immigrants contribute the most to Italy’s birth rate, data shows

Over 10,000 Romanian children were born in Italy in 2024, contributing the most to the birth rate in the peninsula, relative to the number of people, Digi24 reported.

The 2024 birth rate is Italy’s lowest in the past century. A historic low of fewer than 370,000 children were born last year on Italian territory.

There were some 281,000 more deaths than births in 2024, and the population fell to 58.9 million.

Since 2014, Italy's population has shrunk by almost 1.9 million. One of the main reasons is that few Italian women have two children. On average, they have only 1.18 children.

By comparison, Romanians are the immigrants who have the most children, over 10,500 in 2024, followed by the Moroccan and Albanian immigrants, each with fewer than 10,000 newborns.

Around a million Romanians live in Italy. Foreigners made up 9.2% of the country's population in 2024, for a total of 5.4 million.

Around 60% of children born to foreign parents are born to couples in which both the mother and father come from other countries; only 40% come from mixed couples. In the case of Romanians, usually the parent who is an Italian citizen is the father, according to Digi24.

Aside from the low birth rate, the elderly in Italy see an increase in life expectancy, which jumped to 83.4 years.

Italians also seem eager to leave the country. The 191,000 Italians who moved abroad last year officially represented the highest number this century, spiking more than 20% from the year before

The Italian government vowed to reverse the trend for years, so far to no avail.

(Photo source: Claudiu Marius Pascalina | Dreamstime.com)