Early on a weekday morning in the piazza of my home village, close to Rome, you are nearly certain to find a group of young men standing around, looking as if they are waiting for something or someone to show up.

The men stand outside the bar, smoking and chatting amongst one another but always with a wary eye on the passing traffic. They are nearly all east Europeans - Poles, Romanians and Albanians - and they are enacting a modern day version of the `hiring fair", standing around in the village square for the benefit of any local farmer, builder, lorry driver or other would-be employer who may need a manual labourer for the day.

On workday mornings all over Italy, in piazzas, at crossroads, at traffic lights and on highways and byways, this same scene is acted out thousands of times. It is proof of something that economists, labour market analysts and sociologists have been saying for some years now. Namely, that Italy needs a constant heavy influx of (non-EU) foreigners both to maintain its current population level and, arguably more importantly, to satisfy labour demand.

Last month, that theory appeared to become Italian government policy when both the Minister for the Interior, Mr Enzo Bianco, and the Social Affairs Minister, Ms Livia Turco, defended a proposal to increase the quota for legal immigrants well beyond its current ceiling of 63,000 for this year.

Both ministers argued that after the first six months of the year, more than 80 per cent of the existing quota had already been allocated, pointing out that both ministries had come under pressure from business lobbies, mainly from prosperous northern Italy, looking for more workers. "Our country badly needs a larger labour force," said Mr Bianco.

That remark was made partly in defiance of those centre-right opposition exponents who have argued that a country with a nationwide unemployment level of 11.4 per cent (in parts of the south, unemployment levels for people under 26 years of age often rise as high as 5060 per cent) should develop policies that give priority to helping young Italians find work.

Whilst the centre-right's concern about unemployed young Italians is understandable, all the more so given that the south is a traditionally strong reservoir of centre-right votes, the reservations appear to fly in the face of contemporary Italian reality.

All across the prosperous north, businessmen claim that there are now quite simply a whole range of manual, labouring jobs in heavy industry, in the construction industry and in seasonal agricultural harvesting that Italians are no longer willing to do. The industrialists' association of Udine, in the north-east of Italy and close to the border with Slovenia, pointed out last month that it had applied for 4,800 immigrant hiring permits but had been granted only 1,000.

Nor was Udine alone in the north-east with such a complaint. Mr Luigi Rossi Luciani, chairman of the Veneto chapter of Confindustria (Confederation of Italian Industry), joined the debate by saying that many local firms would simply be forced to relocate their production in eastern Europe if they could not find more workers.

Another telling indication of the demand for the non-EU workforce came from Mr Guido Bolaffi, head of immigration and integration policy at the Social Affairs Ministry. Speaking at a Rome conference, he pointed out that the 15,000 slots reserved for employer-sponsored candidates (i.e. the employer guarantees that he has a regular job, with social security contributions paid, ready and waiting for the named immigrant) were taken in just one morning.

Mr Bolaffi did, however, go on to point out that Italy is "in an anomalous situation" by comparison with northern European partners in that it is a country that has become a land of immigration before reaching full employment. The relatively high Italian unemployment figures, especially in the South, allied to popular fears that rising immigration means rising crime, represent the major objections to increasing foreign worker quotas.

Regular reports of clashes between clandestine smugglers of boat people and Italian police do litte to reassure public opinion. In one recent incident at Marina di Castro on the Puglia coast on July 24th, two police officers died after their boat had been deliberately rammed by smugglers, caught ferrying ethnic Kurds across the Adriatic.

Nor has public opinion eased by an oft-quoted statistic showing that one third of the inmates in Italy's prisons are immigrants. Other studies, however, counter this by pointing out that legal immigrants (as opposed to illegal ones) are no more or no less likely to commit crimes than Italians.

The issue remains a delicate one, related to the fact that the gradual but growing shift towards a multi-ethnic Italian society is a recent phenomenon. In contrast to EU partners like Britain and France, modern Italy does not have an extensive colonial past and has become familiar with the systematic arrival of large numbers of non-EU "immigrati" only in the last 20 years.

The issue remains one of the hottest political potatoes of the day. Not for nothing Mr Silvio Berlusconi of Forza Italia and Northern League leader Mr Umberto Bossi sealed a born-again political alliance by unveiling a new immigration policy midway through last April's turbulent regional election campaign. They called for strict new immigration quotas, tough prison sentences for those who smuggle in "boat people" and also the use of navy force, including the right to open fire, on smugglers in Italian territorial waters.

That policy may not have been central to the centre-right's resounding success in those elections but it probably did them no harm. Ironically, Mr Bossi's own political stronghold, the northeast, is home to a vibrant, export-driven economy in which foreign workers already account for up to a third of the workforce.

Market forces and labour demand, rather than centre-left arguments, may in the end overcome centre-right reservations about the admission of ever-greater numbers of non-EU workers into Italy. Calling for up to 40,000 extra permits for this year, the Interior Minister, Mr Bianco, argued that Italy's rapidly-aging population badly needs "new and vital energies". He added, by way of historical reminder, that Italy had exported 25 million emigrants in the last 120 years. The time has come, he suggested, for Italy to repay its (moral) debts.