Into the Light.(immigration policy, Italy)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)

At dusk, immigrants gather on the south side of the Duomo, the famous 15th-century cathedral, in Milan. Peruvian and Filipina maids, construction workers from North Africa, Ukraine and Moldova, and Nigerian and South Asian street sweepers chat, smoke and piazza-watch. For Lofti Ben Hassan, a 41-year-old Tunisian who has been working in Italy for seven years, dusk at the Duomo provides a break from nine- hour days on a construction site and nights squatting with 11 others in an abandoned house. His wife arranges flowers for the dead; he takes a 1,000-lire shower once a week at a public bath. "They say Italy is the First World, but it's the Third World," he says, pulling on a bent cigarette. "They do nothing for us here except give us work."

Italy is one of Europe's newest immigrant societies. Until about 20 years ago it exported more workers than it imported. Today immigrants still make up only 2.9 percent of the population, the lowest percentage in Europe. Immigrants have received a particularly warm welcome in Italy's vast black-market economy, where they work off the books and beyond the reach of social services. But all that is starting to change, with both the government and powerful employer associations now estimating a need for hundreds of thousands more immigrants to make up a looming labor shortage. In the past year, polls show, the Italian public has begun to accept young immigrants as a necessary solution to an aging work force. Says Emilio Reyneri, a sociologist at the University of Milan: "We are ...