ROME (Reuters) - Italy is to admit 300 migrant workers from Lebanon, Ivory Coast and Ethiopia who will not have refugee status under a pilot project spearheaded by the Community of Sant'Egidio, a Catholic charity and advocacy group.
The "work corridors", which Sant'Egidio agreed on Friday with the interior ministry, follow pledges by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's rightist government to balance a tough approach on irregular migration with some openings for legal migrants.
Italy has one of the world's oldest and fastest-shrinking populations and is short of labour in lower-paid jobs in manufacturing, hospitality and home nursing. Business groups have also been making attempts to recruit relatively cheap labour from poorer countries outside the European Union.
Sant'Egidio staff will help select and recruit the migrants in their countries of origin, giving them Italian language and professional training for specific jobs reserved for them before they move, the charity said.
The initiative is an offshoot of the "humanitarian corridors" that Sant'Egidio has been running with other Christian charities, under which more than 7,000 refugees have been allowed to enter Italy legally since 2016.
The numbers are a fraction of overall immigration, however.
Italy registered around 158,000 irregular sea arrivals from North Africa last year, and more than 16,000 in the year to date, according to interior ministry data.
Meloni's administration has expanded the number of work visas for non-EU citizens to 452,000 for 2023-2025.
These visas typically benefit undocumented migrants already in Italy who use the quotas to legalise their situation, and online applications for them have been massively oversubscribed.