Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister wants to exchange immigrants for children – RT World News

Italians should consider having more children to fill the country’s shrinking labor force to avoid bringing in more immigrants in the future, Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani has suggested.

Over the past decade, Italy has had one of the lowest birth rates in Europe, and the 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 year before, provisional figures from Italy’s national statistics agency ISTAT show. With a stable population, the figure should stand at around 2.1 children per woman.

“We have a problem of population decline, and we must understand if we want to have more children,” Tajani said 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 have more children, then we can also say: ok, let’s reduce the number of legal immigrants coming to work in our businesses. But if not, we won’t have any workers,” said the minister. “The lower the number of births, the more we need foreign workers in our country,” he added.

Tajani, however, did not provide any plan to strengthen fertility in the country. Nor did he say when exactly it would make any visible impact if the rapidly aging population somehow heeded his call. The minister’s knowledge has been ridiculed by the opposition against the right-wing government. Valeria Valente, a senator from the left-wing Democratic Party (PD), described them as “nonsense.”

“These are all issues in which the government of (Giorgia) Meloni has done little and has done poorly because it continues to look at the world from the great hole of nationalism, while we should think of Italy in terms of a piece of the United Nations of Europe,” Valente insisted.

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