Mohamed Keita moved to the right Italian region because our Decreto Flussi tracker said so

The Italian Decreto Flussi for 2024 opened 452,000 slots over the three-year programming period. On paper the quota is national; in practice it is regionally administered, and the processing speed varies enormously between the Prefetture of different provinces. Mohamed had been living and working informally in Catania for just over two years when he first read our Decreto Flussi tracker.

The tracker is a monthly-updated page that cross-references three data sources: the Ministero dell’Interno announcements, the regional Prefettura press releases, and our own network of Italian immigration lawyers in each of the twenty regions. For each region we publish the number of nulla osta approved in the previous quarter, the typical processing time, and the sectoral quotas that are still open. In the quarter Mohamed read the page, the Prefettura of Modena in Emilia-Romagna had the fastest processing time in the agricultural-sector quota — roughly four months, against twelve to fifteen in Sicily.

Mohamed moved from Catania to a small town outside Modena on a one-way train ticket. He found work on an agricultural cooperative within three weeks through a Malian friend of a friend. The cooperative’s HR coordinator — who had sponsored four nulla osta applications in the previous twelve months — filed Mohamed’s application through the Decreto Flussi click-day process in late October. The nulla osta was issued in late February. Mohamed travelled back to Mali to collect his entry visa, which the Italian consulate in Bamako issued within three weeks.

He re-entered Italy on a legal work visa, converted the visa to a permesso di soggiorno at the Modena Questura, and started his contract with the cooperative. The whole process from his first reading of our tracker to his permesso in hand was eleven months. If he had stayed in Catania and tried the same route in Sicily, the same step would have taken him close to two years — and the Sicilian agricultural quota for his category was already closed for the year.

Mohamed is in his second year with the cooperative. He is paying Italian income tax and social contributions and has rented a small flat in the town where he works. He writes to us every few months to tell us which of our tracker’s figures are off. We update the page accordingly. The feedback loop is the whole point.