Number of undocumented migrants in Italia falling: the estimate stands at 339,000

Foreign nationals residing in Italy without a residence permit are estimated to number 339,000 (latest available figure, relating to 2025), compared with a legal foreign population of 5.5 million people. This is the estimate produced by the Ismu Ets Foundation, based on sample surveys and analyses that allow the calculation to be extended back to the early 1990s. The number of undocumented migrants has fallen gradually, from the 506,000 estimated in 2022. However, this figure fluctuates cyclically, rising and falling as a result of the amnesties that have been introduced over the years.

Under the amnesty linked to the Bossi-Fini Act of 2002 (Law 189/2002) – one of the largest of its kind in Europe – almost 700,000 foreign workers were regularised. A few years later, in 2006, the number of undocumented migrants had once again exceeded 760,000. The extension of that year’s immigration quota decree, designed to accommodate all employment applications submitted by employers, brought the number of undocumented migrants down to 349,000 in 2007. ‘The number of foreign nationals residing illegally in Italia,’ explains Professor Gian Carlo Blangiardo, Emeritus Professor of Demography at the University of Milan-Bicocca and President of the ISMU-ETS Foundation, ‘fluctuates and reflects the effect of regularisation schemes. Since the 1990s, regularisation schemes have depleted the pool of undocumented migrants, which then replenished itself. The announcement or preparatory phase of an amnesty scheme in itself leads to an increase in the number of undocumented migrants in the preceding year’.

Ennio Codini, a lecturer in administrative law at the Catholic University of Milan and head of the legislation department at the ISMU Foundation, points out that ‘the phenomenon of irregular migrants is present in all European countries, but their numbers increase where it is more widespreadundeclared work, such as in Italy’.

Contributing to the rise in the number of irregular migrants are arrivals by sea and arrivals by land: in 2025, both routes recorded lower numbers compared to the peak in 2023. Landings, for example, totalled 157,652 in 2023, whilst they stood at around 66,000 in both 2024 and 2025.

What other factors might explain the decline in the number of irregular migrants in recent years? “I do not rule out — continues Ennio Codini — that the increase in quotas for the entry of non-EU workers, established by the latest immigration decrees, may have had an impact in terms of regularisation, nor that there have been movements from Italia to other countries or returns to their home countries. The demand for labour has also fallen,” he adds, “in the construction industry, a sector that traditionally employs many foreign workers, including those without proper papers’.