The National Policy Brief “Relations between migration policies and labour policies in the production of irregular work in Italy”, produced within the European Horizon DignityFirm project, highlights the paradoxes of the Italian quota system regulating labour migration. The latter appears highly dysfunctional and a source of irregular work. In 2024 alone, 14,000 workers (out of 24,151 visas issued) arrived in Italy to find that their prospective employers were no longer willing to hire them – due to the long delays between the initial application and their actual arrival – leaving them at risk of falling into irregularity. Foreign students finishing their studies face a similar fate: converting a study permit into a work permit can take up to a year, forcing many young foreigners to miss out on important job opportunities or accept undeclared or precarious work simply because the conversion doesn’t happen in time.