Giorgia Meloni’s government has allowed nearly half a million migrants to come legally to Italy due to the country’s demographic crisis while remaining a hard-liner on illegal migration.
Labor Shortages and Official Migration Quotas
Italy faces a demographic emergency: with 25.1% of its population over 65, it is the third-oldest country in the world after Japan and Puerto Rico. Birth rates have plummeted for over a decade, leading to a natural population decline that threatens the pension system, healthcare, and economic productivity.
To counter this, Italy requires an estimated 280,000 migrant workers annually until 2050 to offset labor shortages in agriculture, elder care, and manufacturing, according to IDOS Study and Research Centre.
A Paradox Between the Rhetoric and the Actions
“Politically, she can talk tough on migration. But economically, she’s much more pragmatic,” said Prof Erik Jones, a political economist and expert on Italy.
While legal migrants are welcomed with open arms, the government is determined to crack down on irregular arrivals coming by boat. Meloni’s government is trying to speed up the pace of repatriations and clamp down on the activities of NGOs that rescue migrants in the Mediterranean.
Between 2023 and 2024, Italy cut the total number of sea arrivals by 58 per cent, from 157,650 to around 66,441.
Under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Italy has officially expanded legal work visa quotas, planning to admit nearly 500,000 non-EU workers by 2028; but systemic delays, bureaucratic hurdles, and sectoral urgency have created a de facto tolerance for informal entries.
Many migrants, particularly from North Africa and South Asia, enter through irregular channels and vanish into the informal economy, where employers rely on their labor despite legal risks. Though no official policy admits to “secret” border openings, the gap between legal quotas and labor market demands makes unofficial inflows an inevitable, if unacknowledged, component of Italy’s survival strategy. The hidden reliance on undocumented workers is not merely a loophole but a structural necessity.
Demographic Decline
Italy’s ageing population and declining birth rate are behind the government’s policy of inviting hundreds of thousands of migrants into the country.
In 2024, Italy registered 281,000 more deaths than births, and the population fell by 37,000 to 58.93 million, continuing a long-term trend. In the same year, there were 369,944 births, down by 2.6% over the previous year, according to the National Statistics Institute of Italy.
Italy is a country of approximately fifty-nine million people, with over five million foreigners and 1.62 million Italian citizens of non-European origin.
As experts note, this demographic structure, in which a disproportionately small portion of the working population must support a growing elderly population and pay for their care and pensions, is becoming increasingly unsustainable.
While official channels are being expanded, the reality on the ground suggests that undocumented arrivals remain a hidden pillar of economic continuity. The need for labor is so acute that even critics of immigration now acknowledge its necessity.
Also, Meloni’s experiment in offshoring asylum processes to a non-EU third country has stirred the interest of leaders across Europe. German chancellor Friedrich Merz, British prime minister Keir Starmer, and European Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen are among those watching closely, curious to see how this Italian initiative will unfold.
