From Libya to Lampedusa: creating a Cultural Identity Card: psycho-transcultural evaluation of integration potential

Almost every day boatloads of immigrants arrive in Sicily from Libya. Although a great number of immigrants use Sicily as an arrival point and expect to go to Northern Europe, many of them settle in Sicily (Licciardello & Damigella, 2011) and other parts of Italy. Integration has become an extremely important and controversial global issue (Terranova & Toffle, 2014) that needs to be addressed. How to assist immigrants in the integration process is the subject of this paper. An estimated total of 170,000 immigrants (Italian Ministry of the Interior, March 3, 2015) arrived in Sicily in 2014,primarily in Lampedusa but also in various areas of the south of Italy. Furthermore, the recent prediction by Spanish Interior Minister Jorge Diaz is that for 2015, the number of immigrants into Italy will soar to at least 200,000 (Diaz, 12 March, 2015, RAI). The purpose of this study is to report the experience of administering psychological tests in an official immigrant center in Milan, Italy, designed to target the predicted integration potential. The aim is to demonstrate the process and the results, and to suggest a wider use of this procedure in an effort to assist immigrants in the integration process. Immigrants were interviewed and administered the “World Test-Test del Mondo” (Vitale & Terranova-Cecchini, 2015) and Cultural Identikit (Terranova-Cecchini, 2009) by a medical-psychological team. These instruments were used to create a “Cultural Identity Card” which was used to identify immigrants in terms of their integration potential. Careful records were created combined with tracking. Results suggested that the Cultural Identity Card can be a useful predictor of integration potential. A national testing project is recommended to facilitate the cultural adjustment and integration process. If the national results are useful, the use could be expanded internationally.