International Organization for Migration (IOM)

of legally accessing the Italian labour market – “…the policy of closing the front
door of legal entry, while keeping the back door for illegal entry half open”, (Zincone,
1998) – is just one example of the absence of governance of the Italian migration
policy. Indeed, together with the frequent amnesties that have been granted in
Italy over the last 30 years (Fasani, 2010), the “Flows Decrees” has mainly served
the purpose of recognizing that the labour market integration of immigrants had
occurred outside the legal framework.
Clearly, the role of the Italian government in dealing with the migration policy of
the country could well be expected to become more pro-active. As far as the labour
market is concerned, for instance, it is possible to identify different areas where
public intervention and better management could lead to easier and better matches
between employers and immigrant workers. First of all, the government could try
to intervene directly in different aspects of the matching process between employers
and immigrant workers in Italy. Second, a serious reform of the possibility of legal
access to the Italian labour market for workers residing abroad would contribute to a
substantial improvement of the situation.
A new role for the public employment offices?
The evidence we have seen shows that immigrants do interact significantly with the
Public Employment Offices. At the same time, these offices only manage to place
a negligible fraction of the foreign workers in employment. This discrepancy is also
existent for native workers. In general, when compared to other European countries,
the performance of the Italian PEOs appears rather poor (Giubileo, 2011). Utilizing
the fact that workers – both native and foreign – do attend the Public Employment
Offices, what could be done to improve their performance in facilitating concrete
placements in the labour market?
It is not necessarily a foregone conclusion that one should expect the PEOs to improve
their effectiveness in placing workers. Given the characteristics of the Italian labour
market and the type of occupations foreign workers are demanded for, informal
methods and private agencies – such as temporary workers agencies – may be able
to perform this task more efficiently than any alternative public body (Bracalenti,
Balestrieri, and Testore, 2010). Investing public resources in strengthening the
placement capability of PEOs should be done only if one believes that public
placement can be more efficient than private, or that it might be preferable because,
for instance, it could produce “better matches” in the labour market and reduce ethnic
segmentation. The poor performance of Italian PEOs can be explained by the fact
that most of their resources are exhausted in dealing with paperwork, rather than
being utilized to foster their interventions as labour market intermediaries: reducing
– through outsourcing and |IT– the burden imposed by the former activities would
free up resources that can be devoted to the latter (Giubileo and Pastore, 2012). The
creation of an online and continuously updated database of vacancies and candidates
seems to be a logical first step towards a more efficient role of PEOs in the job
matching process in Italy (Giubileo and Pastore, 2012).
country studIes – ITALY
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