This paper aims to show some assessments arising from the life tables of non-nationals living in Italy, which we calculated for the very first time and analysed in-depth. Our main goals are: (i) illustrating the Italian case concerning the use of more precise indicators for the analysis of non-nationals; (ii) focussing on some specificities of foreign citizens living in Italy and comparing them with the countries of citizenship; (iii) evaluating the “healthy-migrant effect” and the Italian peculiarities of the related “salmon-bias effect”. We processed life tables for the years from 2010 to 2018 concerning the three countries of citizenship, corresponding to the numerically largest groups: Romania, Albania, and Morocco. Among all the calculated biometric functions, we processed a specific indicator we deemed the most appropriate for the Italian case. We named it ‘APYL’, i.e. the average person-years lived between some central age classes (ex,x+n). We later found that this measure is only rarely mentioned in the literature and was first used by us operationally and effectively to address the critical issues that characterise our reference population. We compared these results with the situation in each country of citizenship to assess migratory effects. The achieved results highlighted the advantages of non-nationals residing in Italy: they represent a select group compared both to their compatriots who did not move and to Italians. Life tables proved to be an important pioneering experiment for developing robust and replicable methods and making available a wide range of crucial information.