The Minister of Energy Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher recalled on Friday September 16 that, behind their anti-immigration speeches, Italy and Hungary were increasingly using foreign workers to compensate for the labor shortage in certain professions.
This mid-September 2023, thousands of migrants arrived on the island of Lampedusa, in Italy, relaunching debates on the reception of foreigners in European countries. Jordan Bardella, the president of the National Rally, called on Emmanuel Macron to commit not to welcoming “only one migrant”.
In response, the Minister of Energy Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher wanted to confront the European far right with its contradictions and a certain hypocrisy which, according to her, consists of making anti-immigration speeches while taking advantage of the hand of work that immigrants represent. She takes the Italian and Hungarian examples: “You know that Madame Meloni is the first to talk about the regularization of undocumented immigrants. Mr. Orban, who is nevertheless the great defender, the ally of Madame Le Pen, is the first to regularize undocumented immigrants”she declared Friday September 16 on Europe 1. True or false?
Foreign workers against labor shortage
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban may not exactly be “the first ones” to regularize undocumented immigrants to use their labor force. There is no European comparison of regularizations for this reason, to franceinfo’s knowledge.
Nevertheless, it is true that the two countries, both Italy and Hungary, are increasingly resorting to non-European foreign labor to compensate for the shortage of workers in certain fields, which the In France, we call them “professions in tension”. And this, despite the firm and anti-immigration speeches of the leaders of the two countries.
Nearly 123,000 foreign workers in Italy
In a decree signed by Giorgia Meloni in December 2022 and published in the Gazzetta Aufficiale – the Italian Official Gazette – in January 2023, Rome planned to grant 82,705 work permits to foreigners to work during the year. Or around 13,000 more than the previous year, when the decree was signed by his predecessor Mario Draghi.
The president of the Italian council even signed a new decree, published in July 2023, to increase the number of work permits reserved for foreigners. It rose to 122,705.
The January decree sets both contract quotas (seasonal or not), the types of professions that can benefit from them (transport of goods, construction, tourism-hotels, mechanics, telecommunications, food industries and shipbuilding) and the country of origin of the workers eligible to benefit from it (Albania, Algeria, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, South Korea, Ivory Coast, Egypt, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Philippines, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Japan , Guatemala, India, Kosovo, Mali, Morocco, Mauritius, Moldova, Montenegro, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Republic of North Macedonia, Senegal, Serbia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tunisia and Ukraine).
Italy’s double discourse towards migrants is summed up by two declarations from its Minister of Agriculture Francesco Lollobrigida. In February 2023, he assured that Italy would “strive to bring into the country around 500,000 legal migrants”, according to the Italian press agency Ansa. Two months later, in April, he caused a scandal by warning against “ethnic replacement” of Italians by migrants, as reported by AFP, the French press agency.
14% more foreign workers in Hungary
It’s a bit the same thing in Hungary, where chosen immigration nevertheless has even more restrictive criteria. Non-European workers are accepted, mainly from Asia and South America, but not from sub-Saharan Africa or the Maghreb.
In the country, the use of foreign workers became normalized after the arrival of Covid-19 in 2020. The following year, Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban signed a decree to allow foreigners from certain countries to obtain a two-year work visa in just a few weeks. Result: the number of non-European foreign workers increased by 14% in one year between 2021 and 2022, according to the Hungarian National Statistics Institute cited by The world .
And the rules will be further relaxed next November with the application of a law adopted last summer. It ratifies the creation of the status of “guest workers” for foreign labor. A status which is obtained more easily, without the need for official notice from the authorities, but which also gives access to fewer rights.