To keep its promises, the right needs immigrants

The Ceuta incident, as we have seen, has reignited the ‘blame the foreigner’ narrative amongst Europe’s far right, particularly if the foreigner happens to be of colour. The images of the ‘invasion’ of Ceuta have brought out the worst in Europe’s right-wing parties and reminded us just how directly the exploitation of immigration-related issues correlates with the proximity of general elections. Elections are approaching in Italy, France, Spain and Poland, and the demagoguery surrounding the Ceuta incident – which, fortunately, lasted only a few days – stems in part from this: the desire on the part of the European right to scrape together a few more followers and a bit more support by evoking the most primal fear of all. The foreigner, especially if they are of colour. The script is always the same. There is an invasion. Migrants are at our gates. We must defend ourselves. We must shut ourselves off. We must save our peoples to give them a future.

Election campaigns have begun across half of Europe, and alongside proposals to tackle immigration (the verbs vary depending on how the parties are faring in the polls, ranging from the simple ‘govern’ to the more challenging ‘tackle’, through to the harsher ‘curb’, and concluding with the definitive ‘block’) we shall see others with which the far right will seek to prove that they are not just all talk, badges and migrants to be stopped. Election manifestos will bring us satisfaction, disappointment and despair. But to lay bare the extremism of the most radical right-wingers when they talk about migrants, there is an original approach we suggest: examining just how many of the right-wing populists’ promises would be unachievable without the contribution of immigration. The Italian far right, before every election campaign, as well as attacking the banks, finds more or less original ways to promise to lower the retirement age – an issue on which General Vannacci, who retired at 56, cannot comment: it is best not to mention the subject, at least during the election campaign.

The topic was: pensions. First point. Does the right want to send Italians into retirement earlier? Let’s do the maths. By 2050, the proportion of people aged between 15 and 64 is forecast to fall from 63.5 to 54.3 per cent, whilst those aged over 65 will rise from 24.3 to 34.6 per cent. Therefore: to realistically promise that pensions can be brought forward – a folly which, fortunately, the right-wing government in Italy did not carry out after promising it – we will inevitably need more legal, employed immigrants, capable of funding the pensions of the future.

Second point. The right, as it often repeats during the election campaign, wants to cut taxes (proposing this during the campaign is one thing, actually doing it in government is quite another) and, at the same time, wants to find a way to increase spending so it can put its ideas into practice – including a flat tax, child benefits, more spending on the police, more funding for healthcare and more support for schools? Perfect. In order to be able to promise this without being laughed at – even if they don’t actually follow through – it must be acknowledged that the state needs more tax revenue. To generate more tax revenue for the state, the working-age population needs to be expanded. To expand the working population, what is needed? The answer comes from Istat: in 2025, Italy maintained its balance because, whilst the population of Italian nationals fell by 189,000, the foreign population rose by 188,000. Have you heard any ‘sovereignists’ complaining about this figure? No. And you know why.

Third point. Do you want to be credible in the fight against the falling birth rate? Very well. To do so, you’ll probably need more money, and money can be found more easily by broadening the tax-paying base rather than by making everyone pay more tax, given that spending review policies are a taboo subject. But to combat the falling birth rate, whilst we wait for Italians to start having children again, we need to look at the data here too. Without immigrants, the demographic crisis will worsen. With immigrants, the effects of the demographic crisis can be offset, at least in part. Here too, Istat comes to our aid: in 2025, just 355,000 children were born and the natural balance was negative by 296,000 people. The positive net migration figure, on the other hand, stood at 296,000 and almost exactly offset the difference between deaths and births. Have you heard any ‘sovereignists’ complaining about this figure? No. And you know why.

Point number four: do you want to stop the brain drain? Well, long live the motherland. But if you want to stop the brain drain, you cannot simply try to retain Italian talent. You must find a way to make foreign talent more eager to come to Italy. And here is the paradox documented by Istat: between 2019 and 2024, Italy lost 78,000 young Italian graduates, but recorded a net gain of 88,000 young foreign graduates. The overall result: just under 10,000 more graduates. A positive result achieved solely thanks to immigration.

Point number five: do you wish, in the name of patriotism, to defend ‘Made in Italy’? Very well. But the companies that are banking on ‘Made in Italy’ need a workforce to produce their goods. They cannot find all the labour they need amongst the workers available in Italy. To secure the workforce required to enable ‘Made in Italy’ to compete on the global stage, we need additional non-Italian labour. And the result is what we know: to make the industry – which the ‘sovereignist’ movement rightly wishes to protect in the name of ‘Made in Italy’ – more Italian, more foreign workers are needed, not for ideological reasons but for production-related ones. According to Unioncamere data, Italian companies expected to rely on foreign workers for almost one in four planned recruitments by 2025. This figure rose to one in three in the construction sector and to more than two in five in agriculture and the textile industry.

The ultimate paradox for the sovereignist right, which plays the card of xenophobia to the hilt, is that even the question of all questions – that of security – requires concrete action, hardly compatible with fear of foreigners, if it is to receive genuine answers rather than merely viral ones. To achieve greater security, it is not enough simply to "stop" immigration or work to deport those who should not be in the country. It is necessary, but not sufficient. To combat insecurity, we must work vigorously on legal channels, fast-track documentation, proper contracts, training, checks on employers, the fight against illegal recruitment networks and effective repatriation. Making immigrants invisible does not lead to greater control, but to more irregularity and greater vulnerability to blackmail. And, once we realise that not even the most hardline right-wingers can afford to be genuinely anti-immigrant, it will be easy to see that a right wing keen to protect Italy – if it is to be credible – cannot simply say ‘let’s stop them all’; rather, to make its proposals even remotely compatible with reality, it must learn to understand how to accommodate more immigrants without this becoming a catalyst for fear. Ceuta comes and goes, but reality does not.