Apart from the ISTAT statistics, the Caritas and Migrantes Caritas and Migrants verify the total existence, in Italy, in 2008, of 3,800,000 – 4,000,000 regular immigrants, in a population of 59,619,290 Italian citizens (1) . This means that the regular immigrants are 6.7% of the population, 0.7% more than the coeval European average. The first community, which has doubled in circa three years, is the Romanian one, with over a million becoming regularized in 2008. These are followed by the Albanians with 402,000 immigrants and by Moroccans with 366,000 subjects.
The estimate of revenue by the immigration system concerns, principally IRPEF (personal income tax), with more than 3 billion Euro, ICI (property tax for the local council) with 10,536,000 Euro and the other taxes ( land registry and council),for a total of tax revenue of 3,749,371,550 Euro.
But the question we intend to pose here, concern less the strictly economic and fiscal aspect of immigration, than the strategic importance of the phenomenon. We must look at how the infra and extra continental flows of population can be essential elements of an indirect strategy of an economic and geo-political character.
As is known, the Liddell Hart theory defines the indirect strategy as that group of activities used to bend the will of the adversary, without destroying it, hitting the factories, the morale of the enemy, and its networks of communications (2) .
Here, naturally, it does not mean we have to study the destructive aspects of the indirect strategy in the system of the migratory flows, but rather, to utilize this concept to elaborate a Global Strategy of the immigration – legal or illegal – observing its long-term effects, the transformations it induces in the productive apparatuses of the host Countries, the effects on their future activities of foreign policy, the modifications that are produced in the ways of live, the cultural identity and the political structure of representation of the States that receive the largest quota of immigration from the developing Countries of the Third World.
In fact, it is not a coincidence that the first wave of immigration reached Italy in the 80’s, after the petroleum shock of 1973-74, when the North European Countries and France closed their borders to their traditional areas of immigration. To be specific: a crisis of increased oil prices generates a stagflation effect, lowers the rate of growth, increases the level of the prices and, in principle, the rate of inflation (3) . Therefore, the management of the immigration is inscribed, at least at the beginning, in the control of the flows towards the competing Countries of the same economic area, with the purpose of containing the rate of unemployment and diminish the cost of the immigrant integration and the burden on national welfare. Finally, there is a typically strategic aspect of the policies of immigrant flows, even though we see the geo-economic choices of the exporter Countries of manpower.
In fact, on the part of the developing Countries, the demographic pressure is diminished, with evident relief for the national public accounts, the quota of dangerous social groups (4) present in the Country of origin is diminished and, lastly, it allows the transfer onto the economies of the developed Countries that quota of over-population relative to the developing Countries, which, if maintained also with systems of “dictatorship of the food bowl” (5) , would result in blocking any type of economic take-off, both Statist and neo-liberal (6) .
Therefore, if we propose K1 as optimal quota of population of working age for the self-propulsive growth in a country P, then the potential emigration quota Em, will be Em> = K1.
Furthermore, we must remember that the petroleum shock of 1973-74 was organized, with an agreement between Anwar el Sadat and the Saudi King, to “punish” the Western Countries which took the side of Israel in the war of the Yom Kippur, and to create a dependence mechanism on petroleum with the constitution of the OPEC cartel (7) .
Therefore, if we compare the population to a strategic asset like petroleum – which could be paradoxical, but functions logically – then the optimal strategy for the low-price manpower producing Countries would be that of operating with an almost-OPEC strategy, which combines phases of opening and favour to a mass emigration at moments in which the emigration is strongly rationed, but in a phase in which the productive systems of the Countries receiving the migratory flows are already adapted to the price, typology, quantity and diffusion of the immigration already established. Both in phases of expansion of the manpower market and in that of State limitation on migration, the exporter Countries enjoy a condition which, in the Theory of Games, is of the win-win type: those who send immigrants diminish the social and political costs of their relative over-population and, therefore, indirectly increase both the average income and the productivity of their internal workers; while in the phases of State limitation of the migration, the Countries of origin see the costs of work grow in the developed Countries and, therefore, can erode – with their low price products – the market quotas reached by the migrant receiving Countries which, in addition, are obliged to receive other quotas of emigration, in the future.
A securitization policy of the migration, akin to that of the petroleum and raw materials, which transfers its own reserve of manpower abroad, while it forces de facto the receiver Countries at production costs, given the average salaries (here it is of no importance whether they are regular or irregular migrants) to continue the productive chain at low productivity, which will soon be eroded or substituted by the Third World Countries in phase of industrialization. The management strategy of the emigration, on the part of the Countries of origin, forces the receiver Countries to continue beyond the normal, in mature or even decocted industrial sectors, which are the easiest to be substituted in the world market by the growing Third World Countries.
The same logical form is valid for the “grey” or “black” economy, which is the illegal integration system of clandestine immigrant workers, and which is sometimes legalized. The optimum form of the grey or black economy, strictly from the economic point of view (8) , is that which:
allows the migrant workers to have rapid access to a job at whatever salary;
permits the maximum elasticity of the labour, which substitutes the technology in which the “owner” does not invest;
permits, over a certain limit, the sustainability of the administrative sanctions and, even criminal sanctions to the infractions committed by the “black” company.
A part of the grey economy has appeared also in the past two years, in the “flexible economy”, where the high technology itself facilitates the exit from the system of the contracts of the labour-force both legal and “grey-black” (9) . In other terms: given the quota of capital Dc, available for each entrepreneur, and Ts the cost of the capital employed, and Qt the non-financial costs of production – much more important in a “black” or “grey” economy than in a legal one – ( one thinks, for example, of the publicity and distribution alone) then the rational choice the condition in which the entrepreneur L is able to produce a quota of income Rp such that Rp > Dc+Ts+Qt/Nm, where Nm is the number of migrants active in the single production.
This implies that – greater the number of migrants for the same quota of the overall amount of salaries paid, greater the quota of Rp income – both for the product unit and in the total of the output. And, therefore, also in this case we have a win-win strategy on the part of the offer of legal or illegal migrant work: greater the quantity of work demand employed, greater the usefulness of the work of the single migrant and that of the entire company in which he is employed. Furthermore, it should be remembered that the network of illegal migrant work permits both the partial utilization of the legal financing by the banks and, above all, the use, by the entrepreneur, of the “black” financing, both that already laundered and that in phase of “whitening”, which is usually offered by the criminal organizations that supply them with the migrant manpower or by illegal structures that distribute the product of their companies or, perhaps, “protect” the entrepreneur from the union organizations, which could organize the manpower and bring it to a legalized state (10) .
Therefore, the company that operates through the illegal migrant work is structurally favoured from the viewpoint of access to credit, compared to the company that operates in a completely legal way. If then, we assume that, today, the criminal economy creates a parallel economy, a “black” GDP, equal to 725 billion Euro, equal to 41.23% of the 2007 GDP, and which corresponds to a total tax evasion of 206 billion Euro (11) this, therefore, this implies the creation of a favourable market for all the companies that employ, at least, a factor of illegal production, be it the “under the counter” work of the migrant, or the recycling of dirty money, or the use of networks of illicit sales, or productive activities equally elicit.
At a geopolitical level, this means the possibility, by certain sectors and certain geographic areas, of being integrated through geo-economic means, into legal and illegal systems of many Third World or developing Countries, which externalize their criminal networks; acquire the “washed” incomes of their illicit activities in the West; permit, with the first phases of re-cycling of their capital in Italy and Europe to finance the companies which favour the absorption of their manpower and their raw materials and lastly, permit the criminal protection, either through Italian or European gangs or other foreign provenance, of all the illegal chain that has been constituted abroad. Nothing is thrown away: the structural criminality is exported, produces income without added costs for the security of the Countries of origin, manages marginal manpower exported illegally or legally to the West, forces the Italian or other EU Countries’ economic cycles, to follow the necessities of the rapid and competitive development of the exporter Countries both of criminal structure and of surplus and illegal manpower (12) .
The trans-national criminality, which has its axis in the management of the clandestine immigration, tends to geo-economically colonize the weak zones of the EU and make them homogeneous with the economic, political and strategic necessities of the Countries of criminal organization provenance.
Therefore, the management of the illegal immigration by the illicit structures which direct it (13) allow a kind of “opposite colonization” by Third World Countries, which acquire with the externalization of their criminal networks, the added capital necessary, in a context of global economic crisis, to manage the economic “take-off” of their Countries and to maintain, with the collateral exportation of the “dangerous classes” and the redistributive effects of the reduction of the reserve industrial army, as Karl Marx called it (14) , to limit industrial expansion of the developed Countries, shrinking and rendering the credit dangerous and to make the productive chains of the southern Countries of the EU and those in construction of the Third World Countries superimposable. An opposite integration from “weak to strong”, which will have its political correspondence in the progressive penetration, according to the doctrine of Abu Mus’b Al Suri, of the European societies to determine the progressive weakening with respect to the jihad of the sword, according to the criteria expressed by him of the nizam la tanzim, “system, not organization”, an operative machine open to all the jihadists involved or the individualized terrorism, above all, in the West, or the mass management of “open fronts” Afghanistan, Palestine, etc.,) and, finally, the highly organized and closed microstructure like the Lebanese Asbat Al Ansar. A delocalized and non-verticist jihad which could be activated in the peripheries of the European mass immigration or in the para-legal productive networks where the immigrated manpower, legal or legalized, becomes the greater part among the workers (15) . And, above all, where the illegal structures which furnish and manage them have the possibility of controlling the concession of the capital to the local entrepreneurial concerns that hire them. The organized crime lives in a “closed circle” structure and, any similar situation, permits an optimum allocative efficiency (16) for all the operations manageable by the criminal structures. The delocalized jihad, however, would function as a militant and strategic support for the geo-economic “subjection” of the Western areas, in line with the hypothesis of Al Qaeda after the substantial closure of the anti-jihadist operations in Iraq (17) .