Immigration Phenomena and Interaction with Native Citizens
Due to the recent financial crisis, which some European States have still to overtake, foundation principles and organisational structures of the European Union were put in the spotlight. Moreover, at the last European elections, eurosceptic parties were able to become more influent in the European Parliament. In the meantime, there has been a drastic increase in immigration from North Africa to Italy, which raised the debate of the distribution of immigrants among the European State Members. This means that a unified communitarian policy regarding immigration is still lacking and it is, more than before, an essential topic in the European Parliament agenda. For these reasons, quantitative tools to understand the impact of a high number of immigrants in a state member of the E.U. can be extremely helpful to better tackle the problem. Statistical Mechanics (see here for a brief description) is a valuable tool in this sense, since it is able to describe physical situations in which many agents are present. The main idea is to divide people in two groups, immigrants and native citizens, and allow them to interact with each other. This corresponds to the typical scenario of the Curie-Weiss model in which two parties of spins are present. The above mentioned mathematical rationale is also able to manage different sociological indicators. Recently, typical statistical-mechanics techniques have been successfully applied to describe marriages among immigrants and native citizens in Spain, in order to understand possible trends of integration. Now, the idea is to apply those techniques to many other European States, even without considering the role of immigration: in this way it would be possible, in principle, to check the existence of cultural fractures among the native citizens of a country.