ROME (dpa) – There’s a dire shortage of labour in a land once beset by unemployment. – While many European nations fear an influx of foreigners, Italy’s employers’ associations are calling for 105,000 immigrants to be allowed into the country this year.
Not long ago, politicians were deeply concerned about unemployment. Now Italy is crying out for workers. Demand is greatest in the industrialized north of the country, where businessmen are crying out for workers.
Now Rome plans to provide inducements for North Africans, Eastern Europeans and Asians, although others see this as a risky strategy. They want industrialists to invest in the impoverished south of Italy instead.
The industrial associations refer to an “emergency in the labour market” or “the miracle in the north” to describe the new trend. “In certain kinds of employment there is no alternative but to rely on immigration from abroad,” one spokesman has said.
In some areas joblessness has fallen to four per cent – equivalent effectively to full employment. The lack of workers in small and medium-sized businesses is particularly apparent in Venice, Trento and the southern Tyrol.
Where other European countries are looking for information technology specialists, Italy also needs workers in traditional industries like car manufacture and steel, as well as artisans. There is also a need for lower-paid jobs, like nurses.
Most of the demand is in the north, but even in the traditionally poor south, in Apulia and Campania, the region around Naples, there are several thousand vacancies.
The government is taking measures to alleviate the situation, recently deciding to allow 63,000 foreigners into the country from outside the European Union.
Now, in measures aimed at attracting more immigrants and integrating them into Italian life, Minister for Social Solidarity Livia Turco intends to offer courses in Italian, and Public Works Minister Nerio Nesi is pledging to build 50,000 to 60,000 homes for the newcomers.
Interior Minister Enzo Bianco is putting forward two further initiatives for immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Third World, offering voting rights at local authority level and a fast track to becoming naturalized Italian citizens.
“It will fulfil a dream for them if the son of an immigrant is able to call himself an Italian,” he says, promising a draft law will be published soon.
Florentine Cardinal Silvano Piovanelli has also done his bit to sweep aside the many reservations. He foresaw that Moslem members of staff would start their main holiday on a Friday, rather than on Sunday.
“I am not against allowing people who belong to a different religion their own day of worship,” he said. Until now there has been strong opposition to ideas like this.
There is, however, opposition to the notion of bringing in immigrant labour. “The question facing Italy is not attracting workers to the north but shifting the work to the south,” Labour Minister Cesare Salvi says.
Many parts of the southern Mezzogiorno have unemployment rates above 20 per cent.
“If northern businessmen cannot find workers, that means they are paying too little,” Salvi says.
But attempts in the past to promote investment in southern Italy have failed in the past, and all the northern industrialists can offer the south is for the unemployed to move north – immigration within their own country.
