Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, “who ran for office on an anti-immigration platform, has now announced plans to let in hundreds of thousands of immigrants, in order to deal with the Italian labor shortage,” notes Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic. The fact that Italy has hordes of unwanted illegal immigrants who can barely read doesn’t change the fact that it also needs legal immigrants to fill labor shortages, as long as those legal immigrants have useful skills or can read and write and learn how to do a unfilled job.
Reuters reports:
Italy will issue nearly 500,000 new work visas for non-EU nationals from 2026 to 2028, a cabinet statement said on Monday, as part of a strategy to expand legal immigration channels in response to labour shortages. A total 164,850 people will be allowed in next year, aiming to reach a cumulative total of 497,550 new entries by 2028.
It is the second such move Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has made since she took office nearly three years ago as the head of a right-wing coalition. The government had already decided to issue over 450,000 permits to migrants between 2023 and 2025.
Alongside rules to allow in new workers, Meloni has taken a tough stance against illegal arrivals, moving to speed up repatriations and curbing the activities of charities rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean….An ageing population and a sagging birthrate highlight the need to attract foreign workers in the euro zone’s third largest economy. There were some 281,000 more deaths than births in 2024 and the population fell by 37,000 to 58.93 million, continuing a decade-long trend.
In the U.S., President Donald Trump already has his hands full trying to deport millions of illegal aliens. Yet he is reducing the number of immigrants legally present in the country by ending a Biden-era parole program that gave temporary protected status to hundreds of thousands of migrants from countries like Cuba and Venezuela.
It is dumb to deport the Cubans and the Venezuelans (except the few who belong to Tren de Aragua or have committed crimes against other people). Venezuelan immigrants have a lower crime rate than Americans as a whole. Cubans and Venezuelan immigrants are disproportionately located in states like Florida and Texas that have big labor shortages. These migrants were mostly gainfully employed. They can read and write, in a language that is spoken in many U.S. businesses: Spanish, which often is spoken among workers in restaurants and on construction sites, unlike many Third World languages that are incomprehensible to Americans. The Cuban and Venezuelan immigrants were mostly an economic asset to the United States. It is usually good to provide refuge to people escaping communist countries. It was long the policy of the United States to provide refuge for basically anyone fleeing Cuba, before Obama ended that policy on January 12, 2017. Letting Cubans in benefited America.
Mass migration from parts of the Third World could place great burdens on our schools and social services, since Third Worlders speak a bewildering array of languages and often can’t read or write, or are functionally illiterate. But that hasn’t been true of Cuban immigrants, who can read and write and get jobs, and can learn English quickly because English and Spanish have a lot of similarities. Migrants from other countries in the Third World could present more challenges. A blogger made that argument last year:
If immigrants speak a huge multitude of different languages, rather than just a few, it is harder for their host country to communicate with them in all those languages. Yet the federal government requires that the public schools educate every non-English-speaking student, and accommodate their limited English proficiency, even if no one else in a school speaks the student’s language, and the student is an illegal alien. Schools have to translate notices to students’ families into every obscure language spoken by any student in the school, and provide adequate instruction to all English language learners, regardless of what language they speak (which may include bilingual education as a bridge to English language proficiency).
Soon, schools will have to accommodate hundreds of African languages that no school staff speak, and that are utterly unlike English and hard to learn. That’s because African immigration is rapidly rising even as immigration from Mexico has declined over the past generation. This will cost billions and billions of dollars annually. The New York Times reported that “African migration to the U.S. soars”, with “African migrants” going through “Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico” on their way to “arrive at the southern U.S. border.” Thousands of people have recently migrated from African countries like Guinea and the Congo to New York City, like the 1300 migrants from Guinea who recently swarmed New York’s City Hall. A pro-immigration historian points out that because African birthrates remain high, while Latin American birthrates are rapidly falling, “African immigration” is “the future.” New York City has already spent over $5 billion on food, shelter, and services for migrants. Over 3,000 languages are spoken in Africa.
In the last couple generations, most immigrants spoke either English or Spanish, making it possible to communicate with them and their families. Immigrants from Asia often already spoke some English upon immigrating, and most ultimately become English-proficient — 71% of foreign-born Indian Americans are fully English proficient, for example. Hispanic immigrants are usually not English-proficient — only about a third of them — but their language is closely related to English, so some Americans can easily learn Spanish to communicate with them and their children, and millions of American citizens speak both Spanish and English. 30-40% of all words in English have a closely related word in Spanish, and the languages have structural similarities and similar sounds — plurals in both languages end in an audible “s,” for example (unlike many Latin or Germanic languages, where plurals end in something else, or French, where the “s” in plural words is silent).
New York City now has thousands of migrants from Africa, who poured across America’s southern border — mostly illegally — and ended up living at taxpayer expense in hotels there. 65,000 migrants are now being sheltered in hotels, dormitories, and other shelters at New York City’s expense. Some of the migrants are from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the largest country in Sub-Saharan Africa (The Congo is one of the poorest and most violent nations on Earth). The migrants are now complaining that New York City doesn’t speak their languages, making it hard to communicate with the city, and hard for their kids to get an education. As one Congolese woman told the City Council’s committees on immigration and hospitals, “In the Congo, you have more than 500 languages… we need people who speak the native language to teach us. That is what we are asking the city [New York City] and the city is refusing to accommodate.”
It’s not surprising that the city isn’t accommodating all these languages. It can’t! No city official speaks these languages. No teacher speaks these languages. Many of these languages exist only in oral — rather than written — form. These languages cannot easily be learned by an American, because they are not Indo-European languages — like English or Spanish — but rather are from utterly different language families, like the Niger-Congo language family. Some of these languages may not be spoken by a single U.S. citizen.
But accommodating all those languages is what New York City schools must do, if they wish to avoid having the federal Education Department cut off all their funds. The Supreme Court ruled that schools must educate even children who are illegal aliens, in its decision in Plyler v. Doe (1982). And as a lawyer explained, “the Education Department, where I used to work as a civil rights attorney, interprets Title VI [of the Civil Rights Act] to require that school districts translate all notices into every conceivable language spoken by even one student or parent using the school system, such as Hmong, and to ignore the cost of oral translations.” The lawyer argued that this requirement was “contrary to basic principles of disparate-impact law, which recognize that high cost can be a defense (not even the Justice Department suggests that costs should be ignored), and that an institutional practice that inadvertently harms just a single minority group member is not illegal discrimination unless it systematically excludes members of that person’s minority group.”
