Migrants, EU governments' bipartisan push for 'regular' migration

The Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, summed up his line in an aut aut aut: Madrid's crossroads is between being a 'rich and prosperous' country by opening its borders or 'closed and poor' by barring them. Sanchez's lunge was part of last week's speech in Congress, the national parliament, where the socialist leader criticised the closure sponsored by the European right-wing and reiterated the priority of reception for 'humanitarian' as well as economic and demographic reasons. The paradox is that the recipe of the Spanish leader, one of the few rising faces of the EU centre-left, ends up overlapping with the policies launched by governments aligned to its exact opposite.

The common denominator materialises in the need to favour 'regular' migration, understood as the inflow of migrants in response to internal labour market needs. In the difference of premise and approach, Sanchez's call for openness to regular migrants in fact coincides with the rationale of the so-called flows decree of the Meloni government (27/09/2023): a measure aimed at the entry of 452 thousand foreign citizens for "reasons of seasonal and non-seasonal employment and self-employment", divided between 136 thousand in 2023, 151 thousand in 2024 and 165 thousand in 2025.

The decree sought by the Italian government stands out in terms of numbers, but the model is traced by executives sitting on the various sides of politics (and the parliamentary hemicycle) in the EU. Poland, ruled until 2023 by the nationalists of Law and Justice, has recorded an exploit of work permits for non-EU citizens, culminating in the peak of 275,000 documents issued in 2023 alone to labourers arriving from Asia and Latin America: a 401% leap compared to 2019 levels, according to a survey by the Warsaw University's Centre for East European Studies. The Romanian government, led since 2023 by social democrat Marcel Ciolacu, has prepared two blocks of 100,000 visas for both last year and the current year: a ceiling revised downwards from the first estimate of 140,000 permits for the current 12 months alone.

"In Europe we are trying to tighten up on irregular migration and at the same time we are increasingly aware of the amount of workers that are needed, however, in many sectors," notes Matteo Villa, researcher at the Ispi study centre.

The contradiction, says Villa, is not so much in the policies as in the official rhetoric: the forces hostile to migration 'continue to work on the argument that works best, the one against foreigners as a danger, and not on the one they are forced to accept: foreign workers "serve" companies'.