Italian Deputy PM suggests more children to avoid migrants

Italians should focus on having more children to replenish the country’s dwindling workforce so as to avoid bringing in more migrants in the future, Italian Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani has suggested.

Over the past decade, Italy has had one of the lowest birthrates in Europe, and its demographic crisis continues to worsen. The country’s fertility rate hit a new record low last year, standing at 1.14, down from 1.18 the previous year, provisional figures from Italy’s national statistics agency ISTAT indicate. For a stable population, the figure should stand at around 2.1 children per woman.

“We have a problem of demographic decline, and we must understand if we want to have more children,” Tajani said on Thursday while speaking at the Festival del Lavoro (Work Festival) in Rome, an annual event that brings together institutions, businesses, and professionals to discuss the labor market.

“If we do have more children, then we can also say: right, let’s reduce the number of legal migrants coming to work in our businesses. But if not, we won’t have any workers,” the minister stated. “The lower the birth rate, the more we need foreign workers in our country,” he added.

Tajani, however, did not offer any plan to boost fertility in the country. Nor did he say when exactly it would yield any tangible effect should the rapidly aging population somehow heed his call. The minister’s insights have been ridiculed by the opposition to the center-right government. Valeria Valente, a senator with the left-wing Democratic Party (PD), described them as “absurd.”

“These are all issues for which the [Giorgia] Meloni government has done little and has done it wrong because it continues to look at the world from the keyhole of nationalisms, while we should think of Italy in terms of a piece of the United States of Europe,” Valente asserted.