A decree adopted Monday evening in the Council of Ministers plans to authorize 497,550 entries from 2026 to 2028 – including nearly 165,000 next year – divided between non -seasonal and independent work, and seasonal work in the agricultural and tourism sectors.
The government of Giorgia Meloni had already issued 450,000 permits between 2023 and 2025, which brought the total to nearly a million, in very high increase after 70,000 in 2021 and 75,700 in 2022.
Since her election in 2022, Ms. Meloni, a head of the far -right party Fratelli d’Italia (FDI), has made the fight against illegal immigration one of her priorities. But his government seeks to multiply the means of legal immigration for non-European workers in order to remedy the shortage of labor in an aging country and confronted with a fall in the birth rate.
The main agricultural union, Coldiretti, praised the government’s decision as a “important not forward to guarantee the availability of workers in the fields and, therefore, food production“However, a senior CGIL union official-the oldest and most important in Italy-said on Tuesday that the new quotas did not take into account the migration dynamics and labor needs.
