Immigration and employment: the figures, beyond the slogans
Italia attracts a less educated workforce than the OECD average. This may leave the country with little to show in terms of productivity gains and mean that younger people end up footing the bill. The point is not how many foreigners arrive, but which ones.
Some fear that foreigners will take jobs away from Italians, leading to lower wages, placing a strain on the welfare system and fuelling crime; businesses and trade unions point out that without them, entire sectors of the economy would face difficulties, whilst demographers note that Italia is ageing and the workforce is set to shrink. Economic research paints a more nuanced picture: it measures not only average effects but also distributional ones; the effects depend on the skills of those arriving, the integration process and the extent to which the economy is able to utilise those skills.
Italia became a country of immigration relatively late, and as at 1 January 2026, the proportion of residents with foreign nationality stood at 9.4 per cent (Istat). For economic analysis, however, it matters less how many arrive and more who arrives. According to OECD indicators from 2023, in 2020 in Italia, 55 per cent of men born abroad had not completed lower secondary education: the highest proportion in Western Europe, compared with 26 per cent in Austria, 30 per cent in France and 19 per cent in the United Kingdom. Even more telling is the trend: between 2010 and 2020, that proportion fell in most European countries – by 15 percentage points in France, by 26 in Portugal – whilst in Italia it rose by 6. A recent study by Basso, Mathur and Peri (2026) notes that immigrants to Italia are relatively less educated by OECD standards, but so is the native population.
This picture reflects structural factors: knowledge-intensive sectors are weak and offer few opportunities to graduates, whilst migration networks lower the costs of relocation for those who are similar to those who have already settled there.
When asked whether immigrants take jobs away from locals, economic literature suggests that immigration reduces employment opportunities for similar workers whilst creating them for complementary ones. Put simply, a foreign bricklayer competes with an Italian bricklayer for the same job, but more construction sites, thanks to the abundant labour supply, mean more work for the engineer and architect overseeing them. The availability of immigrant workers helps to reduce the cost of domestic and care services and enables qualified local women to work more, as documented for Italia by Barone and Mocetti (2011).
The line separating those who gain from those who lose, however, also runs along age lines (Smith, 2012), because an inexperienced 18-year-old may be more exposed to competition from a low-skilled immigrant than a 30-year-old is. Thirty-year-olds in technical and supervisory roles, on the other hand, may benefit from the greater availability of manual labour.
