At the European Council at the end of June, EU leaders dedicated just ten minutes to the issue of migrants. As always, it was decided not to decide: zero negotiations, zero commitments. The good intentions of Mario Draghi and Angela Merkel were of little use, who a few days before the summit – at the end of a bilateral in Berlin – they had spoken of the need for a common strategy between countries of first arrival (such as Italy) and those towards which secondary movements are directed (such as Germany). For now, the agreement on relocations remains a mirage and the only possible agreement concerns the involvement of non-EU countries. But is it really an effective solution? We asked Maurizio Ambrosini, professor of the sociology of migrations at the University of Milan and author of a recent publication for Laterza entitled “The imaginary invasion”.
Professor, at European level it seems that the only way to get all countries to agree is to outsource migration management, transferring large amounts of money to countries of departure or transit - such as Morocco, Tunisia and Libya - on the basis of what done in 2016 with Turkey. What do you think?
«This approach applies to refugees and asylum seekers, who represent a modest segment of the complex world of immigrants. In Italy, in 2019, there were just 300 thousand out of a total of five and a half million legal immigrants. So, wanting to summarize, if the policy for refugees and asylum seekers is outsourcing, for all the others the key word is selection. The European Union carries out a selection based on the so-called 3 Ps: passports (because it allows entry from over 50 countries of the world without a visa), wallets (because some countries, Cyprus and Malta, grant citizenship to investors) and professions. The last point is particularly important: skilled migrants circulate in abundance and they are not just engineers or scientists. In Europe, for example, many Filipino and Indian nurses arrive».
As far as Italy is concerned, the demographic crisis is producing a decline in the active population, a phenomenon which will be less and less sustainable over time. In your opinion, could a careful management of migration policy help counter this trend?
“I'm a little lukewarm on the subject, for two reasons. The first is that if one looks at the data on the Italian labor market he can easily see that the activity rates are still much lower than the European averages, especially for women. The second is that welcoming migrants is not enough for them to become operational immediately. If half a million Africans arrive, mostly illiterate and with little knowledge of the Italian language, how should we employ them? It is necessary to know how to favor the encounter between the needs of our economic system and the potential of foreign workers, both EU and non-EU. For example, as the population ages, we will need hundreds of thousands of family caregivers in the coming years and it is unlikely that Italian workers will be able to meet this demand.
To achieve this goal, in what aspects should Italian migration policy change?
«We need to reopen more serious job entry channels than those currently envisaged by the Flussi decree, which reserves 30 thousand out of 18 places available in a year for seasonal occupations, but completely forgets important figures (starting with family assistants, which we said). For all sectors that do not fall under seasonal work, it would be useful to select immigrants with a score based on three criteria: educational qualifications, mastery of the Italian language and ties with people who already live here and who can therefore help solve practical problems such as housing and other immediate needs to integrate. It would be a points system on the Canadian model: like Cnel we have made a precise proposal in this sense».
However, such an openness risks encountering strong resistance, above all because, according to a certain political narrative, an uncontrolled flow of migrants has been arriving on our property for years. Often we speak of "invasion". But what does the data say?
"That reality is different. Driven by the market, migratory flows to Italy rose up to 2008 and politics had to adapt, regularizing those immigrants whom the market (including families) had let in. Since 2008, with the onset of the great crisis, the market has had less need for immigrants and since then the flows have remained stable. The somewhat paradoxical conclusion is that probably, if we had done nothing and let the migrants who wanted to arrive arrive, let them look for work, let entrepreneurs hire them, the number of immigrants would not be different from that that we have today. If we look at the past, we realize that society has regulated itself according to its needs. Migration policies are not made only of politics, but of the interweaving of the state, the market and civil society".
