Ambrosini: 'Migration policy too securitarian and the market only asks for arms, not brains'

Maurizio Ambrosini, sociologist, has been studying migration processes and policies for years, a subject he teaches at the State University of Milan. Author of numerous texts on the subject, we asked him to explain to us what is wrong with the current Italian rules for the entry of foreign workers, which often risk fuelling irregular work.

"The current entry policy, based on flow decrees and click days, and at the same time burdened with security concerns, requiring lengthy checks and stingy authorisations, is still not working properly. What is more, it opens the field to fraud and deception, mainly to the detriment of immigrants and immigration applicants. Basically, one never knows whether the authorisations will arrive, and when they do, it is usually too late: employers have already had to scramble to find some other way to meet their needs. Not to mention that until recently, the flow decrees, when the procedure was successful, were essentially used to regularise workers already in force'.

First of all, it only exists in Italy, it is an anomaly in the European landscape, the need for which is not felt and the reason for which is not explained. Then it sets up a lottery, in which random factors, such as the speed of the connection, how well the system works, how quickly the operator touches it, end up determining the success of the operation. This is the opposite of a rational and well thought-out system of governing work entries. In fact, employers apparently got tired of it and no longer even covered the available quotas.

Politics is to blame, in terms of the complex, costly and suspicious procedures for recognising degrees obtained abroad, especially outside the OECD area. I never know whether there are really few graduates, or only a few who see their degrees recognised. But I would say that the fundamental problem is the market: it seems to me that our economy, apart from a few exceptions such as the health system, continues to require essentially arms. We export brains rather than attract them. I am convinced that if companies really had important needs for highly qualified labour, i.e. graduates, they would find a way to bring them in. The tool is there, the EU Blue Card, but it is hardly used. Career development is also rare: many immigrants manage well or poorly to stabilise themselves (2.4 million legally employed), but hardly to advance within companies.

The Meloni government has three different migration policies in a precarious balance: hostility towards refugees from the Global South; continuation of the good reception of Ukrainian refugees; unprecedented opening to workers, with a flows decree of 452,000 new entries in three years. Also good was the idea of allowing over-quota entry to workers trained abroad by Italian workers. But as I have already said, the procedures work badly and the security instances block the economic ones. In the end, the devil is in the detail.