Following a series of budgetary cuts as part of populist Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini’s security and migration decree, migrant helper associations claim they have been forced to lay off thousands of employees.

The Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL) union announced the complaint, saying that so far pro-migrant groups have been forced to lay off around 5,000 workers due to the funding cuts in the security decree and added that the social centres were looking at a total of 15,000 layoffs by the end of the year, Italian newspaper Il Giornale reports.

CGIL’s Stefano Sabato commented on the effect of the migration funding cuts saying, “At the moment we have come to count about 5000 redundancy procedures, to which we are responding with the tools available, solidarity agreements, fund for wage integration, but our interest is to be able to restore ordinary social safety nets to cope with the dramatic situation that in this way we risk not being able to manage.”

“If the Security decree is not reformed or amended within 12 months, we will still have to launch mass dismissal procedures,” he added.

Head of Italy's Largest Asylum Centre Slams Open Borders NGOs for Migrant Deaths https://t.co/q1mqYhaCjV — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) February 9, 2019

The announcement of mass layoffs in the pro-migrant reception sector come only months after the left-wing groups complained that their profits were going to decline as a result of the security decree.

As early as 2016, it was revealed that mafia groups were also involved in taking money from the Italian state to run asylum reception centres but were not only pocketing large amounts of cash while giving migrants substandard living arrangements and food, they were also rumoured to have been charging migrants “protection money” as well.

While left-wing NGOs and other pro-mass migration groups have slammed Salvini’s tough anti-mass migration policies, the head of the largest reception centre in the country admitted last year that open borders policies had been negative for both Italians and the migrants themselves.