Italy and Europe need migrants – but won’t say so

Europe’s demographic clock is ticking. By 2030, roughly a quarter of the EU population is projected to be over 65.

Combined with declining birth rates, that contraction in the working-age population is expected to intensify labour shortages.

The result is a familiar European paradox: governments are tightening asylum and border control while simultaneously expanding legal migration routes to meet economic demand.

Italy offers perhaps the clearest expression of this tension.

After more than a decade of decline, Italy’s population has, just about, stabilised.

The reason is neither a baby boom nor a reversal of emigration, but migration. Net inflows have offset a persistent gap between births and deaths, acting as a demographic counterweight in a country that continues to age.

Strip migration out of the equation, and Italy would still be shrinking at pace.

Yet politically, the country is moving in the opposite direction.

Giorgia Meloni’s government has doubled down on a hard-line approach: extending detention, tightening family reunification, accelerating asylum procedures and pursuing expansive forms of externalisation beyond Italy’s borders.

These moves reflect a wider European drift.

The numbers reflect this shift. Asylum applications fell by 27 percent in 2025.

But to read this simply as a story of declining migration would be misleading. What is shrinking is one channel, humanitarian entry, while another is being quietly recalibrated.

Legal migration, increasingly tied to labour market needs, continues to expand.

Meloni’s ‘flow decree’

In Italy, the clearest example is the decreto flussi [flow decree], a government programme for 2026-2028 that allows for around half a million entries for non-EU workers, including more than 150,000 in 2026 alone, reflecting shortages that domestic labour can no longer fill.

The result is a bifurcated system.

On one side is a restrictive, highly visible asylum regime designed to signal control.

On the other is a more technocratic architecture of labour migration designed to plug gaps in an ageing economy.

Italy, like much of Europe, is trying to reconcile two imperatives that do not sit easily together: political demands for border control and economic reliance on foreign labour.

Yet the real weakness of the current model may lie less in how many migrants arrive than in how well they are integrated.

Italy already depends heavily on migrant labour: more than 2.5 million foreign workers account for around one-in-10 jobs, particularly in sectors facing acute shortages such as care, agriculture, hospitality and construction.

That dependence, however, has not been matched by a consistently effective integration strategy.

Migrants contribute significantly to the workforce and new arrivals are increasingly educated, but labour-market outcomes are still constrained by weaknesses in reception and early integration.

Procedural delays, limited access to language training, fragmented local services and uneven support during the first years after arrival all reduce the long-term payoff of migration.

Low-paid, low-status and precarious

This matters because integration in Italy often works through segmentation rather than mobility. Migrants do find work, but disproportionately in low-paid, low-status or highly seasonal sectors. 

This segmentation also feeds a more politically sensitive tension. Migrants are concentrated in lower-paid and more precarious jobs, and often earn less than Italian workers.

In sectors such as agriculture, care and hospitality, employers rely on them precisely because they are more flexible and, often, cheaper.

Yet this does not translate into a straightforward effect on wages. Evidence suggests that migration has little overall impact on native earnings. Rather than replacing local workers, migrants tend to be absorbed into segments of the labour market that are already difficult to staff.

The effect is therefore less one of direct competition than of separation. Migrants and native workers often operate in parallel, rather than in direct substitution. But this distinction is not always experienced that way. Where migrants are concentrated in lower-paid roles, they can shape expectations around wages and conditions, reinforcing the sense that standards are being pushed down, even if aggregate wage effects remain limited.

It is in this gap between economic reality and lived experience that politics takes hold.

For some Italian workers, particularly those in more vulnerable positions, migration is felt as pressure, not complementarity. A harder line on migration, with its emphasis on control, speaks directly to these concerns.

Familiar ‘doom loop’

The result is a familiar loop: an economy that depends on migrant labour, and a politics that responds to the anxieties that dependence can produce.

In that sense, Italy’s problem is not only how many migrants it admits, but what kind of incorporation it offers once they arrive. This is where the demographic argument becomes harder to ignore.

Fertility policies and migration policies operate on different time horizons. New children enter the labour market only decades later, while ageing pressures are intensifying now. Migration can offset that pressure more quickly, but only if countries can attract, retain and integrate workers effectively.

Comparisons within Europe make the contrast clearer.

Spain has taken a more openly growth-oriented approach, combining recruitment with regularisation and broader inclusion. Italy’s model is more ambiguous.

Legal labour channels are expanding, but they remain tightly managed and politically understated. The emphasis is less on integration than on utility.

Whether this equilibrium can hold is another question. Demography is not easily negotiated.

Italy’s population may have stabilised in headline terms, but the working-age population is still shrinking and the age structure is still worsening.

Without sustained inflows, decline resumes; without stronger integration, those inflows deliver less than they could.

The contradiction, then, is not simply between closure and openness. It is between a country that increasingly depends on migration, and a policy framework that still hesitates to treat migrants as part of its long-term future.