Italy and population decline: immigrants as carriers of values and culture

In previous articles we have seen how Italy, with its very low employment rate, could cope with the demographic decline expected in the coming decades both with new inflows of migrants and by integrating into the labour market the many Italians and foreigners who are currently outside or on the margins. Reasonable estimates of the Italian economy's growth potential, however, make it implausible that it will be possible to create the number of decently paid jobs in the next few years that is necessary to rapidly raise the employment rate and at the same time integrate significant numbers of new migrants.

International evidence suggests that immigrants' access to occupations that provide a relatively stable income at a decent level is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for any integration path. This condition tends to fail when the vast majority of working immigrants are employed in informal segments of the labour market, as is the case in Italy. There are therefore good reasons to prioritise inclusive policies aimed at integrating Italians and first- and second-generation immigrants who are already in Italy, but who do not work or are segregated in poorly paid and precarious occupations, rather than focusing on significant inflows of new migrants.

Wisdom and common sense would then require that, in assessing the opportunity to open up to immigrants who will come less and less from neighbouring cultures, such as those of Eastern Europe, and more and more from other continents, it should be borne in mind that immigrants, before being a workforce, are people who carry values and culture that do not necessarily coincide with those of an open society based on equal rights and duties between men and women, tolerance and the protection of individual freedoms. The tensions emerging in other countries hosting large immigrant communities seem to confirm this. In this regard, studies on the economics of culture show how values, moral codes and social norms, especially those regulating gender roles, sexuality, women's work outside the home and fertility, differ according to the immigrants' country of origin (the inactivity rates of foreign women in Italy, for example, vary from over 80% for those from Bangladesh, Egypt and Pakistan to 20/30% for South American women). Even more significant is that social values and norms tend to persist over time, being transmitted - albeit attenuated - from one generation to the next. In this context, numbers count: studies of critical mass dynamics show that when a highly motivated minority, bearers of beliefs, moral codes or religious identities that differ from those most prevalent within a population, exceeds a certain numerical threshold (e.g. as a result of migration flows), a process can be triggered that soon leads to the old value and normative systems being replaced by those of this minority.

In the long term, mass immigration determines irreversible effects in host societies that should lead those who promote it as an inevitable response to demographic decline to be cautious. The latter phenomenon is often perceived with excessive alarm: if Italy in 2025 were to return to having the inhabitants of the years of the economic boom, it would not be a tragedy, also considering the benefits - not only environmental - that would derive from the easing of the excessive anthropic pressure to which many areas of our country are currently subjected. Of course, the decline in the population is accompanied by its progressive ageing, a process that requires major changes in the welfare state and the rapid increase in the employment rate. These adjustments are not easy, but largely manageable with appropriate policies. These must also create the conditions for the younger generations to be able to have the number of children they want, a number that is now systematically higher than the number of children that circumstances actually allow them to have. After that, what will happen in the longer term to the birth rate (and to Italian society!) depends on evolutions in culture and customs that are impossible to predict today.

University of Trento