Immigrants give Italy €500 million a year more than they take

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Tom Kington, Rome

Wednesday October 14 2020, 12.01am, The Times

Immigrants benefit Italy by €500 million a year, a study has found, boosting claims that the nation needs more foreign workers.

The Leone Moressa Foundation compared the taxes paid by the 5.26 million migrants in Italy with the total cost of hosting them.

It found that the expense of sending them to schools, treating them in hospitals and housing them in council homes was half a billion euros less than the annual taxes they pay.

Monia Giovannetti, vice-president of ASGI, an Italian association that promotes legal rights for migrants, said that such research was useful because Italians did not see this side of the social contributions. “They only see foreigners as people who exploit services and benefits as opposed to people who create wealth for the country,” she said.

Foreigners living legally in Italy make up 8.7 per cent of the population, with Romanians the largest group followed by Albanians, Moroccans and Chinese. Together they paid the state €26.6 billion in taxes in 2018, paying income tax while working mostly in low-paid jobs, contributing to pensions and VAT as well as paying taxes on cigarettes and petrol.

The state benefits they received added up to €26.1 billion, leaving a profit of €500 million for the state.

Apart from health, housing, education and local services, the total includes the €3.3 billion spent on caring for migrants in reception centres after they arrive on boats from Africa, processing their asylum claims and offering them social-integration training.

Italy’s migrant population has increased over the past decade as the nation’s birth rate has dropped to the lowest level since records began in 1861, with women averaging 1.29 children, far lower than the 2.1 required to maintain the population.

The demographic trend prompted claims that immigrants would be needed to pay the pensions of Italians.

The survey did not include illegal migrants, thought to number about 600,000. An Italian government amnesty and offer of a work permit was answered by 220,000 illegal immigrants, most of whom were domestic cleaners.

“If they start paying taxes it will mean another €360 million a year for the state,” Enrico Di Pasquale, a researcher at the foundation, said.

The anti-migrant politician Matteo Salvini opposed the amnesty, claiming that the government was “crying for poor migrants but not lifting a finger for millions of jobless Italians”.

He has criticised the government for failing to stop more than 10,000 Tunisians who sailed to Italy this year. Mr Salvini claims that more will be encouraged to come as Rome eases some of the anti-migrant measures he imposed as interior minister last year. He says that foreign workers push down wages, driving Italians into poverty.

“It is true that migrants do depress wages,” Alfonso Giordano, a professor of political geography at Luiss university in Rome, said. “But that is happening while Italian employers are de-localising to China and India to take advantage of lower pay — that is globalisation.”

One sector in which a workforce of migrants, often illegal, has kept wages low is agriculture, which employs up to a million non-Italians. The sociologist Marco Omizzolo said: “You cannot, however, say they have pushed down pay for Italian pickers because there are hardly any in the first place.”

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