Remember the "great amnesty for immigrants"? So far few immigrants have used it

Announced between tears and alarms, regularization started slowly: too many obstacles and a setting that leaves the knife on the side of the employers' handle. Yet another missed opportunity Migrants collect oranges in the Rosarno plain in Calabria, February 2020 (photo: Alfonso Di Vincenzo / Kontrolab / Ipa) Tears should be shed as it is going: let's talk about the amnesty of Minister Teresa Bellanova who hot a government colleague, Peppe Provenzano, had called "an honorable compromise". According to the first numbers, we must also delete that definition of "honorable". Because the law n.34 / 2020, the so-called Sanatoria 2020 - which in reality also applies to Italian workers - is showing what happens when you choose to photograph reality as you please, with the distorted lenses of politics and cutting it out with a thousand vetoes cross. The laws simply don't work. In fact, they risk creating more damage than before.

Until yesterday the requests for regularization of foreign workers submitted online have been, explains Il Sole 24 Ore, just 13 thousand. Another 6 thousand would be arriving. Well below expectations, and certainly far from the intoxication of which many spoke last month (the "600 thousand illegal immigrants" heralded for example by Giorgia Meloni) but also from the estimates provided by the Ministry of Agriculture itself. 220 thousand potential beneficiaries. None of this. There is still a month of time, it is true, and in the end we could touch a share that is considered to be significant. But the feeling is that without a series of changes in progress, the operation will still turn into yet another missed opportunity.

the First reason for the flop: the procedures for those who have a relationship in black leave the knife by the handle of the employers , often also exploiters. Those who, for example, are sometimes called “ monkeys” of the workers (as evidenced by the most recent of a long series of investigations, the public prosecutor of Castrovillari, which has been in the news just yesterday ).

The problem lies both in the initiative itself that in the payment of the 500 euro expected to turn to the practice. Many reports, such as this of the Republic , explain how, in the end, even in the few cases that emerged were often the same workers to pay for it in order to obtain a residence permit for the duration of the contract. And then it is difficult for a employer you autodenunci, while enjoying a shield penalty. Also because most of who employs labourers who are foreign can't rightly enjoy it, saw that the shield does not apply to anyone who has been convicted in the last five years, even with non-final judgment, to facilitation of illegal immigration, exploitation of prostitution or of minors to employ in illicit activities and caporalato.

Then? Then we had to give the initiative to the workers : reported those exploits, you will get a temporary residence permit and you will be accompanied in seeking a new job in the companies in rule, guided by good people. All this with an information campaign that obviously is slow to take off, given that many do not even know of the existence of the amnesty.

Second point: the sectors involved are too few. Missing construction, logistics, catering , other areas that fish with full hands, and in total impunity, the illegal work of foreigners. So much so that some will be forced back into the fields in the hope of being able to access the procedure or they will try to “buy” a contract by a laborer while to tear off the permission. All this when, perhaps, in the course of time were able to emancipate themselves, to integrate and to find something better or something more akin to its own quality. Agriculture, assistance to the person and work of the household, therefore, is not enough, limiting the scope of the measure and of this, we must acknowledge, without controversy.

The third problem is multi-faceted. It concerns, first of all, foreigners with expired residence permit who want to put themselves in search of a job. Because the old permit must be expired before the 31st of October last? And how can they prove they worked in the few areas affected by the amnesty? Not all have statements of account, social security, payroll or certifications of the employment Centres. Still: have not taken into account, by assigning a permission to stay, situations rather intricate as those of anyone who works in the rule, but by virtue of their status as asylum seekers . Finally: why impose limits on the minimum taxable income for workers who intend to regulate? Often, in the case of domestic service, the family will not touch those thresholds (20 thousand euros), but maybe they would intend to execute a or a carer or a home helper who works with them a few hours a week.

Macroscopic issues of logic and substance, the first, technical deficiencies, of the second. Both aspects of that kind of law, he was not to leave you hanging and give the idea of approximation with which it was written. And the excessive dramatisation with which it was presented.