Launching the theme of the into the political arena ius soli, as Minister Kyenge did just a week after trusting Letta, promising the launch of a bill within a fortnight, was a strategically lame choice. The timing advised against bringing such a delicate issue to the table, perceived as a claim by the left, without, among other things, seeking the collaboration of all political forces. The centre-right thus had an easy time condemning the self-referentiality of the Pd; Grillo has invoked, as usual, the referendum, and the result is that the debate on citizenship has been emptied of content and filled with demagoguery.
The theme, then, should perhaps be addressed as a priority a European level, but with the elections in Germany looming, the Eurosceptic populists galloping in England and a generalized distrust in the economic policies imposed by Brussels, the problems generated by the migratory flows risk becoming cannon fodder in an unfavorable political context. The ground must be prepared both internally and abroad, in order not to "burn" the possibility of reforming national and Community legislation on the matter.
To do this, first of all we need to strip away some myths that are rampant when it comes to opening borders and loosening the rules for acquiring citizenship. Already the deputy Ignazio La Russa, in recent days, has feared the risk that adopting the ius alone would entail for the Italian welfare: the former pidiellino fears that thousands of pregnant foreign women from poor countries would be induced to give birth in Italy to automatically guarantee , to their children, citizenship and with it the right to enjoy our welfare. But without helping to maintain it. It is what some define as "welfare immigration".
Put like this, La Russa's objection does not seem unreasonable. Even the president of the Senate, Pietro Grasso, specified that it would not be a question of applying a pure ius alone, a hypothesis later confirmed by Kyenge herself.
But something can be said about the risks implicit in granting "easy citizenship". Taking as an example the American case, with all the due distinctions, some annotations can be made.
The so-called "welfare immigration", first of all, in the United States it does not represent an accounting problem for public finances. It is true, in terms of net present value, the typical immigrant, low-skilled worker consumes more than he pays, representing a net cost to government, especially at the local and state levels, but they are short-term costs which in the long run are offset by the benefits that immigration guarantees.
Furthermore, the typical immigrant does not arrive to exploit public resources, but to look for employment: in the USA, a sample analyzed in 2010 even showed labor force participation rates higher among newcomers (67,8%) than among natives (64,1%).
Then there is a curiosity: Hispanics often emigrate to American states that offer fewer services. This contrasts with the welfare immigration theory, and may be due to the fact that, without a residence permit, assistance would in any case be precluded for "transborder" workers, and that many low-skilled workers are not typically attracted to large centers such as New York, California, Illinois, where highly skilled and high value-added manpower is concentrated.
However, we know that immigrants have a cost, in terms of public resources, they entail. But is it a cost or a net benefit? The question is complicated and lends itself to ideological exploitation. Answering it means analyzing a phenomenon multigenerational, and in this word the architrave of the whole dispute is hidden.
Indeed, like all human beings, migrants proliferate. In the first years of life, their children generate costs especially at the school level. In the United States, they can enroll in school even if their parents do not have a residence permit. When they grow up, enter the world of work and pay taxes, they support their elderly parents if the latter have not collected sufficient benefits.
The most recent studies show that the average tax impact of immigrants is positivepartly because they often arrive at a young age, partly because their descendants tend to be better qualified and earn more, and pay taxes for some services for which, by extension, they do not incur costs (such as defense and payment of interest on public debt). They also help defray the rising costs of starting the child generation to retire baby boomerswhile keeping pension accounts in balance. In hard cash, it has been calculated that an immigrant and his descendants represents an average net income, for American coffers, of about 80 thousand dollars. The glaring difference between the American case and the Italian one is that non-EU work, here, is almost always undeclared, probably involving costs and not advantages for the tax authorities. This is what happens when you don't learn to value a resource, which if mismanaged can become an economic as well as a social burden.
The children of immigrants, therefore, represent a real investment: they are educated better than their parents, growing up they help finance public spending on a par with everyone else. In the US their arrival has not led to an increase in spending on education. In fact, it just has offset the decline in the birth rate helping to keep the labor market dynamic.
What has been said is valid at the national level, but in the various states of the federation there are, at the level of local finance, disparities and asymmetries which give impetus to conflicting currents in public opinion. If this is true for the United States, it is all the more so for Europe: the laws on the matter are uneven in the various countries, and there is no European immigration policy. Suffice it to recall the poor management of the Libyan emergency, when the Mediterranean countries (and Italy above all) were left alone in facing the crisis.
The terrain is delicate and, in the globalized world, the management of border flows will be an increasingly cumbersome issue. How can we think that it shouldn't be tackled at a European level? A common immigration policy also means funds and solidarity between the countries of the Union, a solidarity that has been invoked, probably inappropriately, by countries that are not very credible politically, when they asked for public debt to be pooled or to issue guaranteed bonds at the community level. Today we no longer talk about Eurobonds, but claiming a European immigration policy does not mean cashing in without ensuring that you have done your "homework".
