Asylum seekers and other migrants crossing the Mediterranean irregularly often view Italy as both a transit and host country. Italy has in recent years received the largest number of trans-Mediterranean migrants, prompting opposition from many Italians and heated rhetoric from politicians, while also enabling the rise of the far right. However, many asylum seekers do not wish to remain in Italy. Often, they are simply hoping to pass through the country, but are impeded from moving further north in the free-movement Schengen Area by the European Union’s Dublin Regulation, which mandates that the first Member State into which asylum seekers set foot is responsible for processing their protection claim.
Yet migrants stuck in transit often struggle to secure legal residence and work authorization in Italy. This paradox exposes them to vulnerability and exploitative working environments. Many work in agriculture, and while most migrant farmworkers are legally present laborers from countries such as Romania, India, and Morocco, hundreds of thousands are estimated to lack legal status. In addition to asylum seekers and other irregular arrivals, the population without authorization to live in Italy is swelled by immigrants who arrive legally and then overstay their visa.
Without adequate support from reception and integration systems, many migrants enter the agricultural sector through the illegal caporalato practice involving exploitative recruiters and employers that are prevalent primarily in Southern Italy. The risks of exploitation were especially pronounced during and immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit Italy particularly early and hard. Earlier this year, the death of Indian farmworker Satnam Singh, who was left to die after his arm was severed in a work accident southeast of Rome, galvanized the public against the exploitative and abusive conditions under which unauthorized migrants often work. Despite senior government leaders’ expressions of concern over irregular migration, there is evidence that parts of Italy’s agricultural industry, which is one of Europe’s largest, rely on the sizable number of asylum seekers and other migrants, who may provide the sector a comparative economic advantage.
This article examines how migrants with irregular status can become stuck in Italy on their way deeper into the European Union, creating involuntary immobility. While Italian policy has generally become more restrictive in responding to asylum seekers and others without legal status as the country has tacked rightward politically, policymakers also have sought to provide some legal certainty, especially for agricultural workers.
Historical and Policy Overview
During the 1990s, the sudden economic growth and decrease in birth rates in Southern European countries resulted in massive labor shortages. The demand for rural agricultural workers was often filled by migrants mainly from Eastern Europe and Asia. The discussion of immigration and integration in rural settings gradually became a key issue across the European Union. The bloc’s multilevel governance approach sought to address these challenges.
Italy, for instance, has recruited migrants to meet its agricultural demands through laws such as the 1998 Consolidated Immigration Act, which regulates the number of foreign workers on a quota basis. However, during the economic downturn of 2011, Italy temporarily halted formal recruitment procedures and put restrictions on employing foreign seasonal and nonseasonal workers. The migration and asylum crisis in 2015 and 2016—when 154,000 and 181,000 asylum seekers arrived in Italy by sea, respectively—brought about a new strategy for labor recruitment. Many employers came to see asylum seekers as potential workers, and the government has sought to facilitate migrants’ entry into the labor force by allowing them (with Law 142 of 2015) to work legally 60 days after filing an asylum application. Yet many migrants still work without proper authorization or standard contracts. In 2021, an estimated 230,000 workers were illegally employed in Italy’s agricultural sector, out of around 1 million total agricultural workers.
Immigration and Integration Policies
Over time, Italy has experienced social changes caused by its rapid transition from its role historically as a country of emigration to one of immigration in more recent decades. Through Law 943 of 1986, Italy for the first time created a process for regularizing unauthorized migrants, and Law 40 of 1998 is based on three pillars: curbing irregular migration, regulating legal immigration, and integrating immigrants. The 1998 law allocated funding for integration services and programming, in particular in health care, housing, and Italian language acquisition. The adoption of Law 189 in 2002 (the Bossi-Fini law) created a strict border control policy and made it more difficult for immigrants to become permanent residents.
Until the 2000s, Italian integration policy mainly dealt with economic issues, and thus neglected sociocultural and other areas. The Charter of the Values and Citizenship and Integration (Carta dei valori della cittadinanza e dell’integrazione) in 2006 and the Integration Agreement (Patto per l’integrazione) in 2010 pushed newcomers to learn the Italian language as well as national values and civil culture, including by offering a civic education course. They also stressed labor market inclusion by promoting training, skills development, and entrepreneurship; encouraged immigrants to find housing and avoid living in ethnic enclaves; promoted social and health services through cooperation with agencies at different levels; and guaranteed education to immigrants’ children and unaccompanied minors.
Following the 2015-16 European migration and refugee crisis—which sparked anti-immigrant sentiment and the rise of far-right and populist parties in Europe, including Italy’s Northern League and Five Star Movement—the country adopted the restrictive Security Decree of 2018 (also known as the Salvini Decree, for then-Interior Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini). This decree reduced the number of refugee reception centers and temporarily abolished a residence permit for humanitarian reasons other than asylum. The “special protection” permit (protezione speciale) was revived in 2020 and then restricted in 2023, including by limiting eligibility and preventing holders from obtaining a work permit. Amid the pandemic, the emergency law of 2020 (schema di decreto-legge) sought to regularize unauthorized migrants working in the essential agricultural and domestic-care sectors. It imposed a strict condition of residency, requiring workers to have been in the country before March 8, 2020. Approximately 207,000 applications had been received by May 2023, of which nearly 65,200 were approved and 30,500 declined.
More recently, following a deadly shipwreck in which 94 migrants were killed, and as the number of asylum seeker arrivals was rising to the highest level since 2016, the government adopted additional restrictions in 2023 known as the Cutro Decree, for the southern town where the shipwreck occurred. The decree, which was converted into law in May 2023, restricted the special protection permit, which critics called an incentive for irregular migration, and reduced services in reception centers, among other changes. Additional changes that year prolonged the detention period of migrants without legal status, from three months to up to 18 months.
In November, the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced an agreement in which Albania (which is not an EU Member State) would detain up to 36,000 migrants per year rescued from the Mediterranean by Italian authorities. Under the deal, Italy will manage the detention centers and review migrants’ asylum applications and, for those whose applications are approved, welcome them to Italy; asylum seekers whose cases are rejected will be deported from Albania. The deal has been heavily criticized by civil society organizations and center-left parties. The first migrant detention centers under the agreement were imminently set to open at this writing.
Migration Dynamics and the Agricultural Sector
Newly arrived asylum seekers and other migrants are often stuck in Italy because of the Dublin Regulation, yet the country’s lengthy asylum process and limited access to services such as housing and health care for migrants may make them vulnerable to exploitative working environments. The scholar Federico Oliveri has described this situation as a “legal system of exploitation.”
Many migrants are pushed to enter the agriculture sector, which requires a massive seasonal workforce, mainly in olive growing and viticulture. The availability of a foreign-born workforce has proved a backbone for the agricultural industry, which contributes tens of billions of euros annually to the Italian economy and was the third-largest in Europe as of 2023 (71.9 billion euros), after France (96 billion euros) and Germany (76.6 billion euros). The so-called Flows Decree (Decreto Flussi) has limited the number of seasonal agricultural and tourism workers, permitting just 17,000 from outside the European Union in 2017, although this number has risen to 93,550 for 2025.
Exploitation and the Caporalato System
When there has been a labor shortage in agriculture, much of it has often been filled by asylum seekers and other migrants with irregular status. Often, however, they are subjected to caporalato labor exploitation. Sometimes referred to as the “agro-mafia,” caporalato involves exploitative and illegal behavior by recruiters and employers who are prevalent in the long agricultural supply chain. The daily wage of migrant workers with a special status employed through this network tends to be about 50 percent lower than for those employed under nationally or regionally standard work contracts. Many migrant workers operating in this system are forced to rely on and pay recruiters for basic services such as food, housing, and transportation, all of which may be expensive and meager. Some critics have decried these conditions as a form of modern-day slavery. Nearly 400,000 farmworkers—80 percent of them migrants—were informally recruited through caporalato channels in 2020, according to the research group Osservatorio Placido Rizzotto, which investigates the connection between organized crime and the agricultural industry. Earlier this year, Meloni complained that criminal groups had manipulated the seasonal work visa system to illicitly bring migrants to Italy without employment contracts.
Although Italy has laws to punish “gangmasters” who exploit agricultural laborers, enforcement has been criticized as soft. Moreover, migrant agricultural workers often report facing discrimination, isolation, and racism. The caporalato network operates with the advantage of high demand for short-term seasonal agricultural work and very flexible labor.
Impacts of COVID-19 on Migrants
The COVID-19 global public-health crisis deteriorated the situation for migrant laborers in agriculture. When the pandemic spread globally, migrants were one of the most vulnerable groups in many countries, likely to suffer disproportionately in terms of their health and economic situations. In Italy, immigrants were disproportionately vulnerable for reasons including employment in precarious sectors that did not offer the possibility of remote work, inadequate housing and poor living conditions, and barriers to accessing health and social protection measures.
In 2017, migrants’ 59.9 percent employment rate was slightly higher than that of native Italians (57.6 percent), according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. However, the pandemic ushered in a change: in 2020, immigrants’ employment rate declined to 56.7 percent, while that of natives increased slightly to 58.2 percent. Part of this decline in employment was the result of strict lockdowns, which made it difficult for migrants and others in precarious positions to find new jobs. Migrants in irregular status were also not eligible for government stimulus checks and other benefits designed to revive the economy. The emergency law of 2020 was an effort to address irregular migrants’ economic challenges during the pandemic. However, narrow eligibility meant that in practice the regularization process excluded hundreds of thousands of workers who were not in the country on the necessary dates or who were involved in sectors such as tourism or construction that were not included. Of the estimated 690,000 migrants lacking legal status at the time, approximately 230,000 applied for status and just 38,000 residence permits were issued as of October 2021.
Housing was another pressing need for irregular migrants during the public-health crisis. The Salvini Decree of 2018 had already reduced asylum seekers’ access to reception centers and tightened public services for migrants. Insufficient isolation facilities in the reception centers and overcrowded spaces in migrant-concentrated areas exacerbated their health risks. Although migrants in irregular status have legal access to urgent and essential health services, many were likely unaware of their rights or did not know how to exercise them.
Although the pandemic dramatically decreased agricultural production and employment, Italy remained the EU leader in terms of net agricultural production gains (31.3 billion euros). This situation was to some extent the result of the use of asylum seekers and other migrants in agriculture, though the Italian government turned to other means as well. Many EU Member States faced challenges recruiting seasonal workers, and national farmers’ organizations demanded special “green corridors” to facilitate the movement of seasonal laborers. The Italian Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Forests supported such free movement of workers, and some arrived through an agreement with Morocco, but attempts to create a similar pathway with Romania failed.
Involuntary Immobility?
As part of the conceptualization of migration as an interplay between one’s aspirations and abilities, the notion of involuntary immobility may describe, among others, migrants in transit who remain in a country as a consequence of a lack of resources, violence, border controls, or other factors. In this situation, migrants experience relatively low access to either legal migration opportunities or residency in high-income countries such as Italy.
Whether asylum seekers and other migrants hoping to transit Italy en route to Western Europe should be described as involuntarily immobile (or “trapped”) has led to academic debates, in particular as experiences may reshape one’s intentions for a final destination. Migrants consider a wide number of issues in determining next steps, including visa availability and risk of overstay, asylum application processing, and policies such as the Dublin system that limit their onward movement.
Regardless of the terminology applied to them, migrants in these situations face precarious conditions with a lack of resources and are more likely to become vulnerable to exploitation and extortion by authorities, employers, or smugglers. Elsewhere, for instance, similar descriptions could be used for sub-Saharan Africans in Libya who are stuck there—either while intending to travel to Europe or while seeking employment—and at high risk of abuse, violence, imprisonment, and even murder, which a wide range of organizations have described as crimes against humanity.
The legal paradox for asylum seekers in Italy—many of whom are prevented from going elsewhere in Europe, as they would desire, but are simultaneously unable to obtain stable residence where they live—can trap irregular migrants on their journey. Many become vulnerable to exploitation by caporalato networks or otherwise find themselves in dangerous situations. It is unclear how this reality will be affected by recent policy changes such as the New Pact on Migration and Asylum approved by the European Union earlier this year, which is set to enter into force in 2026 and promises quicker reviews for asylum seekers and swift returns for those whose applications are denied. But as long as migrants without legal status find themselves squeezed between regulatory restrictions, many will remain vulnerable to criminal groups and at risk of exploitation.
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