Legal Status in Limbo: Insights into Italy's Labour Migration Regime

The structural features of the Italian immigration regime and labor market have historically led to high levels of irregularity and precariousness in both labor relations and migrants' legal status. The unresolved tension between the declared fight against irregular migration and unwanted migrants, and the need to secure flexible, low-cost labor for positions that natives no longer wish to occupy, has resulted in repeated, often sudden measures for mass employment-based regularizations and in the cyclical admission of selected foreign workers through the annual quota system known as the Decreto Flussi. In 2020, in the wake of the pandemic crisis, and twelve years after the previous amnesty, the Italian government launched its latest mass regularization, targeting workers in the domestic and agricultural sectors. In 2023, a new three-year plan was introduced for the admission of over 450,000 workers.

Based on an analysis of the 2020 amnesty and the 2023-2025 annual quota mechanism, this paper shows that such measures have created extensive conditions of protracted liminality and legal limbo for migrants. It examines, first, the factors producing administrative limbo during the implementation of these two policies - illustrating the role played by key actors, most notably public administrations, employers, and intermediaries. Second, it explores the implications of this often-protracted legal limbo on the lives of migrants through a discussion of illustrative case studies. The research draws on qualitative interviews conducted within the framework of two Horizon projects, with experts, public officials, employers' organizations, trade unions, private assistance centers responsible for managing the administrative procedures of the amnesty or Decreto Flussi, and migrants who participated in these processes.