This analysis is based on data taken from the INPS and the Sole24ore and the FMI and takes into consideration only regular immigrants residing in Italy, excluding all others. Our goal is not to decide what is right or what is not from the moral point of view: in this article we will only discuss about the benefits and costs of immigration.
According to industry experts, such as INPS Boeri president, the future impact of lack of regular immigrants will be negative. "Immigrants are essential for the maintenance of the social security system that, without them, risks collapse": these are Boeri's words that define immigrants as a fundamental resource for the maintenance of the Italian social security system: but what really is the social security system? The social security system is an economic system based on the savings of individual workers, what our parents save to have an economic budget necessary to be considered safe from the risks caused by loss of work, diseases or natural events or other .
This system is divided into 2 parts: the first is the "public" one that is obligatory, that is the economic contributions paid by the workers which are then used to pay pensions; the second is the private, supplementary part, also called complementary social security.
According to the IMF forecasts, in 2045 we will have a retired worker for each worker, it would be necessary to increase the tax burden (about 80%) in order to preserve this social security system.
Now understood the problem, the future lack of workers able to pay pensions, we must ask ourselves what is the determining cause and then try tro resolve the problem.
The main cause is to be found in the demographic decline of Italy, in fact the relationship between births / deaths is less than 1, which means that there are more deaths than births. In 2045, according to INPS, in Italy there will be 59 million and in 2065 54 million inhabitants, while now, according to the latest ISTAT updates for 2017, we are in 60.59 million inhabitants. In Italy, therefore, there are more and more elderly and less and less young, the average age is in fact 45 years with a percentage of children under 14 years of 14%.
The solution should be sought in helping families to have more children, some say, others think that the solution would be to accommodate more immigrants. Now without going into ideological or moral issues, analyzing only the numbers and speaking from an economic and not social point of view, it is undeniable and incontestable that today immigrants represent an important economic resource: first of all they have a lower average age than ours, about 33 years; moreover about 16 million retirees are foreigners, about 130 thousand,of which one has a contributory pension (80 thousand), a part instead has an assistential pension (50 thousand), for a cost of 800 million euros, compared to 10 billion per year produced by 2.4 million immigrant workers regularly and residing in Italy. Finally, the pensions of immigrants are 99.7% as contributive to the difference of 15% of those of Italians, they do not go to burden the social security system.
The Leone Moressa Foundation has made a study on what the state spends on foreigners: the state is spending about 4 billion euros for health, about 3 billion for education, 2.7 billion related to costs incurred by the Ministry of the Interior, 2 for the justice sector and 4.4 billion for reception. The total, with the addition of social services, reaches 16.6 billion euros. The balance between income and expenses is positive for 2.1 billion. It must also be remembered that immigrants cost the state as long as they remain in the reception status, once they enter the labor market the outputs are reduced: this is why a policy of efficient labor inclusion is considered necessary.
Another hot issue is summarized in the statement "immigrants steal our work".
The following table shows the data of the main works of foreigners:
| Sectors | Foreigns workes | “Pil immigration” (milion euros) |
| Servicies (commerce activities are excluded) | 47,0% | 64,578 |
| Manufacturing | 18,5% | 26,079 |
| Construction | 10,1% | 11,838 |
| Commerce | 8,5% | 10,108 |
| Restaurant business | 10,3% | 9,774 |
| Agricolture | 5,6% | 5,032 |
| Total | 100,0% | 127,408 |
As we can see, 47% perform services, mainly domestic work, and are almost all unskilled jobs. It is estimated that immigrants occupy more than 50% of their jobs in domestic, manual and agricultural ambits; with regard to the latter sector, the background changes a little because the illegal work factor comes in, which takes away about 42.6 billion euro from the state coffers every year. What actually creates immigration is a lowering of the average wage for those unskilled professions subject to undeclared work.
So are immigrants stealing our work?
The answer is NO, because the immigrants do the jobs that only a few young Italians want to do, so the competition takes place only in those sectors that have little appeal and that are not very interesting for young people.
Curated by Federico Battaglia