What is the flows decree, the big scam that pretends to welcome in order to exploit

“There is something new in the sun today, or rather something ancient” , wrote Giovanni Pascoli in the poem L'aquilone composed in 1897. It came to mind in an ironic sense because its incipit is well suited to defining what the new decree on flows for the entry of foreign workers is that the current Government has just approved (pending the opinion of the Unified Conference and the competent parliamentary commissions). Despite the propagandistic emphasis with which it was announced, almost as if it were a turning point in the Meloni government 's immigration policy, there is nothing substantially new in this decree, but rather it is the reintroduction of an old, worn-out, hypocritical and irrational mechanism, with which we continue to deny precisely what we apparently announce we want to do, that is, to create procedures that allow regular entry for work by non-EU citizens.

Let's start the examination of the Dpcm (decree of the President of the Council of Ministers) starting from the numbers: for the three-year period 2026-2028, the entry of 497,550 foreign workers is expected, compared to 452,000 in the previous three-year period. A very modest increase, therefore, of about 10%. Article 2 of the Dpcm states the existence of a "correlation between the size of the incoming flows and the needs of the labor market (...) in an incremental logic in the three-year period "; however, no explanation is provided as to which were the reference documentary sources that led the Government to predict such a modest increase in the number of entries. To compensate for the enormous and growing imbalances caused by the falling birth rate and the increase in longevity consistently highlighted by all scientific studies, and most recently by the one conducted by the Working Group on Ageing Populations and Sustainability ( WGA ) at the European Commission, it would be necessary to have an influx of foreign workers which, calculated for a single year, should be just below what is instead forecast for the entire three-year period.

There is therefore no awareness in the decree of the real and dramatic situation of the needs of the labor market, in any sector (in particular for family assistance, the gap between what is expected and the real need is enormous) and if anything the lack of a plan for the governance of migration and a lack of vision for the future of the country emerges. A different and much more robust program of admissions of foreign workers should also be accompanied by a national plan for social integration, even if provided for by article 42 of the Consolidated Immigration Law, but of which there is no trace, as if nothing needed to be done to guarantee hundreds of thousands of new people effective access to health and social assistance, housing, language training and education. The casual absence of such interventions has become so constant that no one even talks about these issues anymore. Without providing any explanation based on authoritative data and research, the entry quotas for seasonal work are significantly higher for the entire three-year period than the entry quotas for subordinate work (e.g. in 2026, 76,200 quotas for subordinate work are expected compared to 88,000 quotas for seasonal work).

Even though, following a positive change in the legislation introduced by DL 145/24, seasonal workers who have worked for at least three months can be hired with a subordinate employment contract in any sector, the approach of the flows decree seems to be inspired by a completely erroneous conception that continues to imagine the presence of most foreign workers in the Italian economy as temporary. The issue of the lack of being able to access the quota system at various times of the year, thus avoiding all applications being concentrated in the frantic race for the microsecond of the click day, remains completely unaddressed; four click days are planned during the year but they are divided by job duties (the click day for the agricultural sector, the one for the tourism sector, etc.). Therefore, each sector continues to have only one opportunity during the year to submit an application for a job call. This is a procedure that is clearly at odds with the way the labor market works (the employer who needs a worker who is unable to access the click day should wait until the following year to call that worker, which he obviously will not do).

A brief reflection should be dedicated to that symbolic number of foreign workers (320 per year) who are refugees or stateless persons recognized by the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) who are " in the countries of first asylum or transit " (Dpcm art.7). It may appear to be a positive and innovative measure, however modest in quantity, and even some associations evaluate it as such. However, I do not believe this to be the case: it makes no sense to provide a crumb of entry quotas for refugees to be brought in as workers, confusingly mixing together completely different intervention plans and legal concepts, namely international protection and entries for work: what we need is a new regulation that requires the Executive to prepare an annual program of protected entries for refugees (to obviously be included in socio-work autonomy paths once they arrive in Italy) that offers a partial (but real) alternative to the only channel of access to our country that refugees can turn to today, namely the one provided by criminal organizations.

As highlighted by the “I Was a Foreigner” campaign in the dossier entitled “ Long waits and irregularities: not even “retouched”, the flow decree works”, which analyzed the data relating to entries for work starting from the click days of December 2023 and March 2024, in 2024 only 7.8% of the entry quotas established by the government were transformed into residence permits and stable and regular jobs. As the Report observes, it can easily happen “ that the employer refuses to formalize the employment relationship or that the availability to hire ceases because the entry took too long to meet the needs of the company or the families. Or again, unfortunately, it can be a question of real scams and illegitimate behavior to the detriment of workers who pay a few thousand euros to intermediaries or alleged employers, only to arrive in Italy and never hear from them again”.

What the report highlights brings us to the heart of the matter: the flow decree as configured by the current legislation is not at all a tool for planning entries for work reasons because it is based on a completely irrational assumption, namely the hypothesis that in reality an elusive, I would almost say magical, remote meeting occurs between an employer in Italy and a foreign worker living in any country in the world, without the parties ever having met and without there having been proof of employment. It is clear to everyone (and therefore removed) that, except for limited and residual cases (e.g.: family relationships between the employer and the worker, hiring of a foreign worker who has been met abroad on another occasion, acceptance by the employer of the pressing request of one of his workers with whom he has a strong bond of trust to hire a friend or relative, hiring of a highly specialized person with whom the employer agrees to stipulate the contract without having previously met the person, etc.) the irrational remote hiring procedure feeds two channels: the first is that of the scam built on the fake hiring of the worker who is abroad and who once arrived in Italy will not find any employer or will eventually only find a path of ferocious exploitation and blackmail. Anyone can understand that this structural distortion produced by the flow decree procedure is not addressed with repressive provisions, also recently introduced, which have as their only consequence the increase in tariffs.

The second and largely predominant channel is that of the emergence of the foreign worker who is already in Italy and already working illegally with the employer who pretends to hire him from abroad. In the best of cases, this procedure based on fiction and hypocrisy allows the regularization of the situation of illegal work that had been, even for years, the only possibility of survival for the foreign worker. However, it would be very naive to think that many of the employment relationships that manage to emerge with the flows decree were only irregular on an administrative level and were not instead marked by more or less serious levels of exploitation of workers who had no real possibility of freeing themselves from their condition; there is no space here for an examination of the effectiveness of the protection procedures for victims of illicit intermediation and exploitation referred to in article 18 ter of the Immigration Consolidated Law , but what is evident is that such procedures, with uncertain and limited application also due to the lack of funding, can have some utility only if they address numerically limited situations.

The legal system, through its limited tools (criminal repression and assistance to victims), can try to address the pathology of a phenomenon, but not its ordinary existence and reproduction; the exploitation of labor linked to the condition of forced irregularity of residence is a generalized and structural phenomenon that has affected millions of foreign workers in recent decades and is a direct consequence of a rule, such as the decree on flows on entries for work, which remains intact in its irrationality and iniquity.

FROM

Gianfranco Schiavone