MIGRATION GOVERNANCE IN ITALY: THE URGENCY OF SUBSTITUTING STOPGAP MEASURES WITH A STRUCTURED AND SYSTEMIC REFORM

Image source: campaign “Ero straniero. L’umanità che fa bene” (I was a foreigner. The good humanity) sustaining the proposal of the migration law reform  https://erostraniero.radicali.it/

RESPOND Policy Brief [2020/10]

Authors: Prof. Dr. Veronica Federico, Dr Paola Pannia - University of Florence

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Since 2014, Italy is receiving the highest number of non-EU citizens looking for economic opportunities and for international protection in its recent history. In 2019 there were more than 6 million foreigner residents in the country. Despite this high surge in number, the backbone of the national migration legal framework dates back 1998, when Italy counted little more than one million foreigners. Since then, the Italian Consolidated Law on Immigration (Legislative Decree No. 286/1998), the pillar of the system, underwent a number of sectorial reviews, which never resulted in a coherent, systematic reform.

The legal framework has remained obsolete, while the stratification of different reviews  complicates its thorough and harmonious interpretation and enforcement. This should be read in the light of another important element featuring the national policy on migration: a structural lack of organic, coherent and effective instruments of planning and management. Art. 3 of the Italian Consolidated Law on Immigration establishes that every three years the executive should release a “programmatic document” on the national migration policy. This document shall identify: (a) the State’s main interventions (including social and economic measures for non-national residents); (b) the public actions for migrants’ integration; and (c) the criteria to determine the foreigners’ annual entry quota. The most recent “programmatic document” dates back to the triennium 2007 – 2010, which means that in the last seven years the government has failed to fulfil its duty of programmatic planning. The absence of a coherent vision and a clear policy planning, with a cascade-effect, has a number of negative impacts.

The most severe consequence is that the annual measure establishing the quota of working permits (the so-called Decreto Flussi) has not been grounded in any meaningful analysis of Italian needs. The lack of planning has to be coupled with changes introduced by Law No. 189/2002 (the so-called Bossi-Fini Law) which reframed the system of permits to stay for work reasons. The previous system of sponsorship was substituted by a complicated and unrealistic mechanism: to obtain a visa for work reasons, the foreigner must receive an offer of employment before entering the national borders.

Since the economic crisis of 2008-10, the number of work permits has progressively decreased. Annual entry quotas have been far below labour demand, especially in the industrial and agriculture sectors. Furthermore, complex procedures and delays in the applications’ scrutiny made system even more ineffective and there has been a continuous and dramatic mismatch between labour supply and demand. The Decreto Flussi has become “de facto” an instrument to regularize undocumented migrants already working in Italy; therefore, it has had the same effect of mass regularization processes.

These measures have been embedded in a social and political environment that has become more and more hostile to foreigners, fostered by the narratives of the bogus asylum seekers, of migrants depicted as a threat to security, as job-stealers and as opportunist exploiters of the Italian welfare regime.

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