While the Italian government evaluates possible legalization of migrants working in Italy, the organization ActionAid is calling for "structural legalization" and "recognition of foreign citizens as people with rights, regardless of their economic utility" in Italy.
The organization ActionAid is calling on Italy to implement a "structural legalization" of migrant workers, which would "recognize the rights of those currently without a stay permit."
It said foreign citizens should be recognized as people with rights, regardless of their economic utility. The move would "represent an important political, juridical, and social sign, a first step towards comprehensive reform of migration regulations."
'The proposed measure puts market interests before rights'
In its statement, ActionAid said the Italian government's draft bill shows how "adopting an intervention of this type is urgent, and finally seems more than a possibility."
"Even though there isn't a final draft, the logic of the proposed measure however puts market interests before the rights and lives of foreign citizens, considered in a merely utilitarian light, limited to satisfying labour needs in the agricultural, livestock, and fishing sectors," it said.
"Also concerning is the temporary nature of the proposal, which makes existence and work even more precarious, with the probable consequence of negatively impacting pay and living conditions.
"The draft bill, in addition, doesn't even minimally take into consideration women migrants, despite the fact that they are often subject to multiple types of discrimination and at the heart of labour and sexual exploitation.
"Women migrants disappear from public discourse and don't enjoy specific measures, in a way not that different from Italian women: never 'in view' in the management of the emergency in our country and in its media representation," ActionAid said.
'A real change is needed'
"We believe that in this moment a real change is truly needed. Across the continent, solidarity movements are rising up, asking governments for unconditional legalization for people with a precarious status or without documents.
"The draft law had the merit of opening the way, of relieving the urgency of a legalisation. Now it's about going further in the initiative, changing perspective, and ensuring the protection of the rights of all men and women and public health, taking away the requirement of a work contract, and broadening the emergence from irregularity to all productive sectors," said Marco De Ponte, secretary general of ActionAid.