With the demographic crisis, immigration alone is not enough. We need to mobilise Italians

When it comes to labour issues, we tend to look to other countries for inspiration. During the short 2006–2008 parliamentary term, the model of reference was Danish flexicurity. At the time of Renzi’s 2015 Jobs Act, there were two reference models: the Dutch model and the German model of the federal agency ‘Bundesagentur für Arbeit’. Now the reference is Spain, which is carrying out an extraordinary regularisation of foreign nationals, with more than double the number of applications submitted (1,174,978) compared to the figure initially estimated by the government (500,000).

Of course, the labour shortage – referred to in the literature as ‘scarcity’ or ‘labour shortage’ – is also a problem in Italy. According to the CNEL-Unioncamere report, in the first half of 2026, difficulties in recruiting staff affected 44.8 per cent of planned new hires. Rather than a skills mismatch, almost two-thirds of these cases were due to a lack of candidates and have a clear demographic root cause. According to Istat, there were 355,000 births in 2025, equating to 1.14 children per woman: 50,000 fewer than in 2020, and 210,000 fewer than the peak in 2009. The population aged between 15 and 64 has fallen to 37.3 million, a decline of 73,000 people in a single year. The latest forecasts from Istat itself predict a shortfall of almost 7 million people of working age by 2050.

It is not just about the latest trend from the Iberian Peninsula; the argument is that we should rely on more immigrants to compensate for the loss of the workforce, due to the combined effect of ever-decreasing birth rates and a gradual increase in the number of people aged over 65 compared to those under 15. More specifically, to maintain a stable population aged between 20 and 64, in line with the UN study from the early 2000s on replacement migration, in 2019 Demographic Research estimated that Italy would need 392,000 net inflows per year until 2060 and as many as 1.7 million per year to maintain the ratio of the working-age population to the elderly, almost six times the net migration figure for 2025, which stood at 296,000.

In addition to the challenging quantitative data, there is the problem that immigration flows do not match the labour market’s requirements: again according to Istat, new work permits issued to non-EU citizens in 2023 accounted for 11.8 per cent of the total, compared with 39 per cent for family reunification and 32 per cent for international protection. At the same time, the fertility rate among foreign women has fallen from 2.37 children in 2012 to 1.79 in 2024, bringing it into line with the national fertility rate within a single generation. Finally, according to the 2026 INPS report, annual staff turnover among non-EU nationals in the private sector exceeds 50 per cent, compared with around one-third among those born in Italy. In short, immigration supports the base of the population pyramid, but does not reverse the trend towards it becoming a rhombus.

Instead, the solution may lie in the pool of human capital already present in Italy, which is visible in the statistics even if not actively seeking work: with the highest rate amongst the major countries of the European Union, there are 12.4 million economically inactive Italians aged between 15 and 64, accounting for 33.3 per cent of the population in that age group.

Bringing this reserve into play is the task that labour policies must undertake, tailored to different target groups. Bringing more than two million economically inactive women back into the employment services system would mean raising female employment from 54 per cent towards 67 per cent of the European average as reported by Eurostat. Although the figure has fallen by more than twelve percentage points – from 25.7 per cent in 2015 to 13.3 per cent in 2025 – young Italians who are neither in education nor employment remain among the top four in the EU. Moreover, in its March 2024 action plan on labour shortages, the European Commission itself lists the activation of the economically inactive as the first of the five levers identified. Immigration from third countries is the last. The other three are: skills, training and education; working conditions in certain sectors; and fair mobility within the European Union.