I’m looking for information about moving to Italy on an EU Blue Card for Russian citizens. Have there been any successful cases recently? Or is it currently very difficult? If anyone knows, please share your experience.
There is an EU Blue Card in Italy — it’s a separate residence permit (permesso di soggiorno) for highly skilled specialists. I checked the conditions — the salary threshold is 1.5 times the national average (see the Ministero dell’Interno for details). The main difficulty isn’t the paperwork — the employer has to initiate the process themselves and wait for a quota; most Italian companies won’t do this, especially for candidates from Russia.
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Thanks — I didn’t know about the quotas. So does that mean if the employer doesn’t want to bother with it themselves, there’s no chance at all? Or is there some way to convince them that quotas aren’t required for the Blue Card?
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Regarding quotas - the Blue Card in Italy is exempt from the decreto flussi, that’s true. But the employer still applies for the nulla osta through the sportello unico, and that’s their time, their paperwork, their interaction with the queue. I had a situation - I was relocating with a Blue Card from another EU country, found a good position in Italy, but as soon as the employer learned about the whole process for a non-EU candidate, they preferred to fill the vacancy with someone holding a European passport. And salaries in that sector are such that Italian companies aren’t keen to pay one and a half times the average anyway. In the end I realized - exemption from quotas is a plus, but the main barrier isn’t the quotas; it’s that the employer has to actually want to bother with it.
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decreto flussi is about general work visas — 130,000 spots, but the Blue Card goes through a separate channel, not part of those quotas. The problem isn’t the permit itself but that the employer has to initiate it through the Sportello Unico, and most don’t want to. In niches where there really are few local specialists — IT, healthcare, engineering — you’ll find companies willing to do it. Small startups sometimes even look for non‑EU candidates themselves if the profile matches.
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For IT there’s another route besides the Blue Card — EOR, an intermediary between the actual employer and the Italian jurisdiction. The employer pays the EOR company, which officially hires you on an Italian employment contract. A “nulla osta” isn’t needed for this — it’s not an immigration permit, but an employment contract through a resident employer. In Turin I heard that several IT companies relocated non-EU employees this way, without having to deal with the sportello unico.
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