"In addition to not contributing to taxes, undocumented workers are often more involved in illegal activities. My main question is: during the last thirty years, why have governments rejected a quarter of all requests for regularization of immigrants?". These are the words of Francesco Magris, professor at the University of Tours François Rabelais, during a seminar organized at the University of Navarra by the Center for International development (NCID) of the Institute of Culture and Society (ICS).

In his exhibition, Professor Magris has pointed out that governments devote a lot of resources to limit the massive arrival of immigrants. "However, once they have accumulated a large issue of them, a powerful incentive arises to grant tax amnesties, since the regularization of undocumented workers leads to an increase in tax revenues," he said.

Tax amnesty for the wealthiest immigrants

Francesco Magris has pointed out that governments are more interested in taxing those immigrants with higher incomes and expelling the poorest: "They face a dilemma, since the amnesty can be used to detain and deport them. If they know in advance that their application from residency program is going to be rejected, then they may prefer not to manage the documents through the amnesty".

As an example, he mentioned the case of the Italian government. "It announced an amnesty that would increase estimated tax revenues from 1.2 to 1.6 billion euros, corresponding to 750,000 regularizations. However, only 295,126 people requested the documentation because many did not trust that the executive was going to formalize its decision," he stressed. In this sense, he concluded that "this subject of amnesties ends up being applied only to the richest immigrants".