The role of immigrants in the Italian labour market

In little more than a decade, Italy has become a country characterized by immigration from abroad. This pattern is far removed from what central-northern European countries experienced during the 1950s and the 1960s. Immigration has not been explicitly demanded by employers, nor has it been ruled by agreements with the immigrants' countries of origin, nor perceived as necessary for the economic system. For all these reasons, immigration has been chaotic and managed in an emergency and approximate way, even though it is deemed useful and is requested by the "informal" as well as the "official" economy. Following presentations of statistic on trends in the phenomenon, three issues are analysed: - how immigrants are integrated into a labour market that has not called them and into circumstances characterized by the absence of public policies to help them in thier job search. - whether it is possible to separate regular immigration involved in the "official" market from irregular immigration in the hidden economy, considering advantages of the first and harmful effects of the second for the Italian socio-economic system. - whether it is appropriate to address complementarity between immigrant labour and the national labour force in a country with 2,500,000 unemployed workers and heavy territorial unbalances.