International Organization for Migration (IOM)

only in 1998 with the Turco-Napolitano law and was confirmed in 2002 by the
following Bossi-Fini law (Fasani, 2008). According to the design of the system,
each year the government establishes – through the so-called “Flows Decree”
(in Italian: “Decreto Flussi”) – the number of immigrants that will be allowed
to enter the country in the following year for working purposes (both seasonal
and non-seasonal workers). Each region is attributed region-specific quotas and
special quotas are reserved for specific countries of origin (mainly those who have
signed bilateral agreements with Italy). In order to produce the yearly estimates of
the number of new foreign workers needed from abroad – by region and by type
(seasonal/non-seasonal) – the Italian Government usually collects information
from three main sources: a) the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) regarding
demographic trends of the Italian population and the decline of the working
population; b) the Union of Chambers of Commerce, which annually provides
an estimate of the additional immigrant workforce to be included in the labour
market (see Section 2); c) different studies on the state of the Italian productive
system (EMN Italy, 2010).
The government is also allowed to set an entry quota equal to zero in any given
year, which implies that no “Flows Decree” is produced for that year, or to allow
the access only of seasonal workers. This has happened in the past and the current
government also decided to allow the entry of only seasonal workers through the
“2012 Flows Decree” (Ambrosini, 2012b). This uncertainty about the size of the
quotas inevitably affects firms’ strategies of foreign recruitment. The incentives
to invest in searching and screening workers who reside abroad are likely to be
negatively affected by the risk that the employer will then not be able to hire the
workers (or will have to wait for one or more years) because the quota system
prevents from doing so. This is especially the case if the quotas are binding – that
is, are set well below labour market needs – as seems to have often occurred in the
Italian context (Fasani, 2008). 31
Moreover, according to the law, the annual “Flows Decree” should be produced
within a framework of medium-term planning which should be specified every three
years by the Government with the so-called “Three-year Planning Document” (in
Italian: “Documento Programmatico triennale”). Other than defining the Government’s
31 In 2006, for instance, the initial decree provided for 170,000 new immigrant workers, but after
receiving more than 500,000 applications, the government decided to expand the quota to 550,000
workers: the new quota basically created enough space to potentially accept all the applications and
it was substantially equivalent to an amnesty (Codini, 2007). This has been the only case where the
quota has been raised after observing a much larger number of applications than the original quota.
Nevertheless, having substantially more applications than the legal threshold set by the annual “Flows
Decree” seems to be the norm. Since 2007, employers and immigrants can apply through the Internet:
this permits easily measuring the gap between the quota and the actual demand. In 2011, for instance,
the quota was set at 98,000 workers, but, within 4 hours from the opening of the process, more than
300,000 applications had been sent (Polchi, 2011). This introduces a degree of randomness in the
selection of workers – which ends up depending on the speed in filling in the online form, on the
quality of the internet connection, and so forth – which can hardly be optimal for employers and
immigrants (Boeri, 2011).
country studIes – ITALY
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