Italy is one of Europe’s newest immigrant societies. Until about 20 years ago it exported more workers than it imported. Today immigrants still make up only 2.9 percent of the population, the lowest percentage in Europe. Immigrants have received a particularly warm welcome in Italy’s vast black-market economy, where they work off the books and beyond the reach of social services. But all that is starting to change, with both the government and powerful employer associations now estimating a need for hundreds of thousands more immigrants to make up a looming labor shortage. In the past year, polls show, the Italian public has begun to accept young immigrants as a necessary solution to an aging work force. Says Emilio Reyneri, a sociologist at the University of Milan: “We are shifting from the perception of an immigrant invasion to the perception of migrants as needed, but not wanted.”
That leaves immigrants in limbo. Until recently, the state wouldn’t help immigrants, but wouldn’t often deport them either. It was left to Roman Catholic charities to support newcomers with health, medical and legal issues. Immigrants knew Italy as an easy place to find a job, but only in the shadows. Before the passage of a 1998 law allowing foreign citizens to set up their own businesses, immigrants were barred from self-employment. So they turned to an underground economy that is one of the largest in Europe, alongside Germany’s. In Milan alone, estimates sociologist Salvatore Palidda, 70 percent of construction work is done on the black market.
Even as Italian authorities consider allowing more legal immigration, they are toughening up on the twilight economy. The government would gain 5.3 trillion lire in tax revenue if an estimated 500,000 black-market workers were registered. Official estimates put the demand for legal migrant workers at up to 300,000. But the right-wing Northern League, part of Silvio Berlusconi’s governing coalition, has proposed making illegal immigration a crime punishable by jail time. And Labor Minister Roberto Maroni recently suggested that immigrants who don’t work should be “thrown out of the country.” If this is Italy’s idea of sending a clear welcome signal to hardworking immigrants, it had better think again.
