Returns: how many are ordered, how many carried out

What these numbers count

Orders are citizens of non-EU countries whom Italy has ordered to leave its territory; returns are those who left after an order, through a forced or voluntary return. People who leave Italy without anyone recording it are not counted. Eurostat rounds every value to 5, and the totals also include stateless people and people of unknown citizenship, who do not appear in the list of countries: this is why the sum of the countries can differ from the total (by 1,140 orders in 2008, almost all of unknown citizenship).

Orders and returns are not the same people

This is why a country can have more returns than orders in a given year. The ratio is affected by, among other things, readmission agreements with individual countries and the availability of flights and of places in detention centres.

Why the ratio is shown only where there are enough orders

With few orders, a handful of people can move the ratio by many points. The ranking by returns per 100 orders therefore only includes countries with at least 250 orders a year on average over the chosen period (1,000 over four years); in the other sort orders, the ratio for countries below that threshold is shown in grey.

From where, to where

Eurostat records the citizenship of the people returned, not the country where they land; the two almost always coincide, but for Italy the actual destination is not published. On the map every line starts from Italy as a whole: the data do not say from which city, airport or pre-removal detention centre each person left.

Sources

The data can be rebuilt with python3 scripts/build_rimpatri.py. For the method behind the whole atlas: Methodology and sources.