Looking Into Policy Change: How the Italian Asylum Regime Came of Age

Abstract

The chapter illustrates how Italy’s frames, strategies and practices concerning asylum have changed over the last three decades, and how the country has passed from what I have called, using a biological metaphor, infancy to adulthood. For a long time, European pressure and norms over asylum affected Italian legislation without significantly impacting policy frames and actual practices: Italy perceived itself as a transit country and, as a consequence, allowed and even fostered secondary movements of asylum seekers towards other countries and kept its asylum system underdeveloped. Since 2011, those solutions started failing because of the modifications in the social phenomenon of migration (the sharp increase of unplanned inflows) and in the institutional settings where negotiations among Member States occur (the full inclusion of Italy into the Schengen Area and the CEAS). Those failures resulted in a policy change so that the Italian asylum regime came of age: the country adopted a new policy frame by acknowledging itself as a destination country for asylum seekers, overcame ad hoc emergency solutions, and joined the Northern European countries’ call for more responsibility-sharing. However, Italy’s weak political-institutional capacity has slowed down the consolidation of the new practices. At the same time, it appears as largely responsible for the gaps with older destination countries in the management of asylum whereas divergence in policy frames and goals has lost relevance.

1 Introduction

In the field of asylum, Italy has generally been depicted as a latecomer and recalcitrant recipient of the EU legislation (Trauner, 2016; Zaun, 2017). Indeed, for a long time Italy accepted requests to adapt its asylum policies to European standards with only the aim of being included in the Schengen Club without sharing the policy frames and goals underlying those requests.

In this contribution, I argue that the European refugee crisis represented a turning point in this regard, since in this contingency Italy began to share some fundamental traits with older European asylum countries. From the early 1990s to the “North African Emergency” declared in 2011, every new refugee inflow triggered the dilemma of whether or not to provide protection and assistance, whereas the public debate currently revolves around the quality of protection and reception which are regarded as due. Moreover, secondary movements, which had been encouraged for a long time, have been drastically curbed by the adoption of the hotspot approach in 2015 and the consequent systematic fingerprinting of people who irregularly cross the borders. Finally, responsibility-sharing, the traditional concern of Northern European countries, is now at the core of Italian claims with regard to asylum.

In order to understand this policy change, I will analyse the development of policy frames and practices over the last three decades. Indeed, as illustrated in the volume Introduction (see Chap. 1), we can conceive of a migration regime as a mix of ways of both observing and acting on migration (Cvajner et al., 2018), in other words as a mix of frames and practices concerning migration phenomena.¹

Specifically, I will argue that, after two decades of stability, practices and frames started to change in 2011 as a result of modifications in the social phenomenon of migration and in the institutional settings where negotiation between Member States occurs. In contrast, the country’s weak political-institutional capacity has slowed down this process, undermining the consolidation of the new practices. Moreover, this weakness appears as largely responsible for the gaps with older destination countries in the management of asylum whereas divergence in policy frames and goals has lost relevance.

Using a biological metaphor of human life, Sect. 15.2 reconstructs the “infancy” and “puberty” of the Italian asylum regime since the early 1990s; Sect. 15.3 illustrates its “adolescence” after the outbreak of the Arab Spring; and Sect. 15.4 explains its “coming of age”, which occurred during the European refugee crisis. Section 15.5 focuses on the limited national political-institutional capacity as a key explanatory factor for some persisting weaknesses of the Italian asylum regime.

The reconstruction of the events that occurred in the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s (see Sect. 15.2) is based on secondary evidence, i.e., scholarly accounts supplemented by analysis of official documents. The analysis of the subsequent developments (see Sects. 15.3, 15.4 and 15.5) has been drawn from the research conducted within FIERI.² Specifically, it relies on the Horizon2020 projects CEASEVAL and TRAFIG where 53 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders and experts were conducted between 2018 and 2022.

2 From Infancy to Puberty: The Emergence of the Italian Asylum Regime

For a long time, in Italy the arrival of refugees was framed as a marginal phenomenon and gained little attention in policymaking (Marchetti, 2014; Campomori, 2016). This may sound odd, given that its coast represents a substantial part of the European Mediterranean border. Yet, the first arrivals of Albanians by sea in 1991 took the country by surprise since “boat people” were perceived as a rather exotic phenomenon circumscribed to developing countries (Hein, 2010). Indeed, the maritime coast had been an irrelevant border for a long time given that Italy mainly played a key role as a channel for resettling refugees from the East to the West rather than a frontline state in the management of refugee inflows. Following a rather institutionalised practice, from the end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Italy was employed for two-step resettlements: around 220,000 individuals reached Italy from the Soviet Union and were resettled to other countries, mainly North America and Australia, while in the 1990s an agreement between Italy and Israel allowed thousands of Jews in transit to be transferred to the United States (ibidem).

This particular history of asylum probably contributed to framing the arrival of refugees as a transient phenomenon even when it was no longer the case. Against this backdrop, in the 1990s and 2000s European pressure and norms over asylum deeply affected Italian legislation without significantly impacting policy frames and actual practices. For those two decades, legislation changed deeply but Italy went on perceiving itself as a transit country and framing refugee flows as emergencies. Consistently, policy practices developed around three pillars: fostering secondary movements of asylum seekers towards other countries; keeping the asylum system (commissions for processing asylum claims, reception facilities, etc.) underdeveloped so that ad hoc emergency solutions and bottom-up initiatives became the ordinary ways to cope with refugee inflows; opting for national form of temporary protection, convertible into a work, study or family permit in order to limit the number of beneficiaries of international protection and the relative due assistance.

2.1 Infancy, When You Think That Problems Will Fade Away: The 1990s Emergency Approach

Section 10 of the Italian Constitution states that “a foreigner who, in his home country, is denied the actual exercise of the democratic freedoms guaranteed by the Italian Constitution shall be entitled to the right of asylum under the conditions established by law”. Yet, this constitutional right has never been transposed into law: Laws 722/1954 and 95/1970, which enacted, respectively, the Geneva Convention and the Protocol of New York, were the only pieces of legislation on asylum passed by the Italian Parliament until 1990, when Law no. 39 was adopted.

Although the killing of the South African refugee Jerry Masslo in 1989 was a powerful trigger (Colucci, 2018), “the rationale behind the Act 39/1990 was part of the Schengen process, as a way to both implement some requirements for membership and to reassure ‘old’ immigration countries like Germany and the Netherlands that Italy was indeed able to prevent entry of unwanted migrants into the Schengen space” (Finotelli & Sciortino, 2009, p. 123). Since one of the requirements for entering the Schengen Club was repealing the so-called “geographical limitation” to the Geneva Convention which had allowed Italy to accept as refugees only citizens from European countries, this provision was included in Law 39/1990. In addition to that, Law 39/1990 introduced some procedures for recognising refugee status and set up the Central Commission for the Recognition of International Protection that included officials from the central government who performed that task as an additional, non-exclusive assignment, and were complemented with experts from UNHCR with consultative functions.³ No specific material support was foreseen except for small economic allowances (around 18 euros per day) provided during the asylum procedure for a maximum of 45 days. The underdevelopment of the asylum system, embodied in the nonprofessional staff of the Commission and the lack of material support, would remain a persistent trait of the Italian asylum regime for a long time.

The repealing of the geographical limitation together with the collapse of the Soviet Union soon generated a series of subsequent inflows of refugees while the resettlement programmes of North America and Australia abruptly ceased, given that refugees from Eastern Europe lost the political relevance they had had during the Cold War (Hein, 2010).

As a consequence, the new Law found an immediate application when, in 1990, Albanian refugees brought to the country on Italian boats went through the asylum procedure (Bona & Marchetti, 2017). Yet, this was an exception rather than the rule. The refugee inflows that followed throughout the 1990s were mainly managed by adopting an emergency approach and ad hoc measures rather than by applying Law 39/1990: people fleeing conflicts, when not immediately returned, were generally granted renewable temporary protection. This solution was partially aimed at managing those cases where it was assumed that the Geneva Convention, and then Law 39/1990, could not be applied because people were fleeing general violence instead of individual persecution (Vincenzi, 2000; Campomori, 2016). At the same time, it allowed for speeding up the procedures and avoiding the provision of refugee status and the consequent assistance due (Bona & Marchetti, 2017).

Against the backdrop of recurrent exceptional measures, the solutions adopted to cope with the almost 80,000 displaced people who began arriving in 1992 from the former Yugoslavia produced long-term consequences for the Italian asylum regime. Since the collective centres set up by the state offered only 2000 places and maintained rather low-quality standards, civil society started to mobilise to host people in spaces made available by local authorities, parishes and private citizens under the coordination of local committees which were also responsible for fundraising. This mobilisation was then partially institutionalised: Law 390/1992 foresaw some form of coordination with the state through consultations with local authorities, NGOs and voluntary associations. Moreover, agreements were signed between Prefectures, i.e., the local branches of the Ministry of the Interior, and local administrations to cover at least part of the accommodation expenses (ibidem). This experience deeply shaped the subsequent development of the Italian reception system by determining a bottom-up, voluntary-based imprint almost incompatible with the mandatory distribution of asylum seekers which indeed has striven to emerge.

The other main piece of legislation concerning reception passed at that time was Law 563/1995 (the so-called Apulia Law) which, for the first time, introduced reception centres to provide first assistance to migrants in view of their identification and possible repatriation (CDA).⁴ Although the Law referred to a defined time span (1995–1997) and territorial area (namely Apulia where three centres were indeed set up) it has remained for a long time the main piece of legislation regulating first reception centres, including the hotspots introduced in 2015 in the face of the European refugee crisis (Giannetto et al., 2019), revealing the longstanding underdevelopment of the Italian asylum policy.

2.2 Puberty, When the Adults Ask You to Be Responsible: Towards the Setting Up of Ordinary Measures

At the end of the 1990s, Italy started to develop some ordinary measures that represented the first steps on the path out of a totally emergency-based approach relying on ad hoc solutions. Still, as with Law 39/1990, those changes were largely driven by European pressures (Paoli, 2018). Indeed, the abolishment of controls at sea and land borders between October 1997 and March 1998 as a result of enforcement of the Schengen Agreement was accompanied by increasing pressure on Italy for better management of inflows, including those of asylum seekers, since Northern European countries such as Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden were afraid that their generous asylum and welfare systems might act as magnets for secondary movements (Boswell & Geddes, 2011).

A first change in the government’s approach emerged as early as 1998, when the government put the Kurds from Turkey and Iraq through the ordinary asylum procedure, with the aim of avoiding a pull effect of the easily accessible temporary ad hoc protection, and demonstrating to other Member States that Italy did not have excessively liberal immigration policies (Vincenzi, 2000).

In that same year, the centre-left government led by Romano Prodi passed the first systematic and comprehensive immigration act, Law 40/1998 (called Legge Turco-Napolitano). Among the many provisions, this Law authorised the opening of centres for the temporary detention of irregular migrants to be returned, as a response to the Schengen requirements. At the same time, it introduced a permit for humanitarian reasons, defined in rather vague terms, lasting 2 years and convertible into a work, study or family permit. This nation-based protection put an end to the ad hoc pieces of legislation issued for managing specific inflows and was largely applied for the following two decades, until it was abolished by the Migration and Security Decree in 2018 (see Sect. 15.5).

At the same time, the arrival of people from Kosovo, together with the entry into force of the Dublin Convention in 1997, which put the responsibility for processing asylum claims on the first-entry country, stimulated an effort to develop a more standardised and structured reception system that turned into the launch of Shared Action (Azione Comune) in 1999 (Marchetti, 2014; Bona & Marchetti, 2017). This was a network of public and non-public actors stemming from the initiatives developed in the 1990s, co-funded by the European Commission, and based on the principle of decentralised provision of integration services and reception, with projects set up by local actors, including municipalities (CENSIS, 2005; OECD, 2019).

Shared Action developed into the National Asylum Programme (Programma Nazionale Asilo, PNA), which started in October 2000 with a Memorandum of Understanding signed by the Minister of the Interior, UNHCR and ANCI (National Association of Italian Municipality), and entered into force in July 2001. Municipalities became the only local actors eligible to submit reception projects to the Ministry of the Interior (Hein, 2010; Marchetti, 2014). The aim was to institutionalise the Italian reception system and meet the criteria of the European Fund for Refugees through which the PNA was funded (Bona & Marchetti, 2017). Indeed, funding schemes can be regarded as alternative means of pressure: as “soft policies” to pursue Europeanisation (Penninx, 2015).

This process continued during the centre-right government led by Silvio Berlusconi, when PNA was fully institutionalised by Law 189/2002 (called Legge Bossi-Fini) and renamed SPRAR (Protection System for Asylum Seekers and Refugees). Despite some recent changes in its name and access criteria (see Sect. 15.5), SPRAR has remained the Italian ordinary reception system until now. Its facilities are set up on a voluntary basis by local authorities that apply in response to the periodic calls for projects issued by the Ministry of the Interior which covers the largest share of the costs. Reception facilities, usually managed by local NGOs that participate in local authorities’ public bids, are generally articulated in apartment-based solutions; they include integration measures and are highly regulated and monitored. Despite being largely acknowledged as a good practice, SPRAR has always suffered from the limited number of places available, constantly below the reception demands, and an uneven distribution throughout the country, as a consequence of its bottom-up and locally based approach.

Law 189/2002 also set up the National Fund for Asylum Policies and Services and reformed the asylum procedure, instituting the Territorial Commissions for the Recognition of International Protection operating throughout the country so that interviews could be done even outside of Rome. The Commissions were made up of representatives of local authorities, the police, the Prefectures and UNHCR. UNHCR participated in interviews and decisions, and was called on to play a key role over the following years by providing guidelines and information on the origin countries and courts’ judgements, compensating for the other members’ lack of specialised knowledge of asylum or human rights matters.

At the same time, Law 189/2002 introduced restrictive provisions similar to those adopted in older asylum countries, including stricter procedures for expulsion and detention of migrants caught without residence permits and a fast-track asylum procedure at the border (Hein, 2010; Marchetti, 2014).

The other major legislative change in the first decade of the 2000s was the transposition of the EU Directives representing, together with the Dublin and EURODAC Regulations, the core of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) launched at the European Council of Tampere in 1999. Despite the several national bills presented through the 1990s and the early 2000s, asylum provisions had always been included in migration acts so that the laws transposing the EU Directives have so far been the only acts specifically addressing asylum, confirming the key role of the EU in shaping the Italian asylum legislation (Finotelli, 2018).

The concern for the implementation of the new provisions was scarce, however, since their adoption was perceived as responding to European rather than national interests. Consequently, at the end of the 2010s Italy was by no means equipped to process and host even a few tens of thousands of refugees, as was soon revealed by subsequent developments.

3 Adolescence, When You Protest Against the Adults: The Management of the Arab Spring’s Refugees

Given that the above-mentioned advancement in the national legislation was largely driven by top-down pressures from Europe and was not accompanied by a shift in national policy frames, the old emergency approach soon resurfaced. Yet, the usual instruments and practices went through a series of failures which gradually led to a change in policy goals and frames.⁵ Indeed, this time Italy had to act in a new context, where inflows grew significantly and the country was fully integrated into the Schengen Area and the CEAS. Being exposed to a similar problem pressure and regarding Italy as a full partner of the European mobility regime, the other countries became less tolerant towards its old practices. Employing the biological metaphor, we could say that during the “adolescence” stage, the adoption of emergency solutions by Italy appeared to be a sort of revolt against the “adults” of the club it had striven to join.

In 2011, in the face of the increasing inflows unleashed by the so-called Arab Spring – with sea arrivals growing from 4400 in 2010 to 62,700 in 2011 (see Fig. 15.1) – the Italian government tried to export the emergency frame on a European level in order to suspend the regular procedures and activate the exceptional instrument of temporary protection set forth under EU Directive 2001/55/EC. However, both the European Commission and the EU Council rejected the proposal and opted for providing financial and technical aid, framing the crisis as an ordinary influx of irregular migrants and calling for stronger border-control measures by the Italian authorities (Campesi, 2011).

Fig. 15.1

Asylum applications and sea arrivals in Italy (2009–2020). Source: elaboration by the Author of data from Eurostat (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/MIGR_ASYAPPCTZA/default/table?lang=en) and openopolis (https://www.openpolis.it/numeri/gli-arrivi-di-migranti-in-italia-dal-1997-al-2020/)

As a result, on 12 February 2011 the Italian government adopted a national-based ad hoc solution: it declared the state of humanitarian emergency, labelled as the “North Africa Emergency” (ENA, in the Italian acronym).⁶ The Italian authorities considered Tunisian nationals arriving on the Italian shores neither irregular nor subject to international protection (ENM, 2011), and arbitrarily detained them outside any lawful procedures while working with other Member States and the Tunisian government to negotiate diplomatic solutions. On 5 April the government signed an agreement with Tunisia on police cooperation and readmission of irregular migrants. On that same day, the Italian Prime Minister issued a decree whereby temporary humanitarian protection was issued according to Law 40/1998 for the Tunisian citizens who had landed since the beginning of the year (Campesi, 2011).⁷

The same decree provided the migrants with a travel document allowing them to freely circulate within the European Union (ENM, 2011; Marchetti, 2014). The explicit aim was to encourage their departure, and thus to obtain the consensus of the Northern League which was participating in the government and was reluctant to allow migrants from Tunisia to stay in the country (Campesi, 2011). In response, the French government contested the legality of the temporary visa, returning its holders to Italy, and reinstated border checks along the frontier due to “public order concerns” (Carrera et al., 2011). At the Justice and Home Affairs meeting on 11 April 2011, Italy was explicitly accused of violating the “Schengen spirit”. As underlined by Campesi (2011), this was an occasion to open up the debate on the revision of Schengen governance. Indeed, in 2011 the European Commission proposed a series of amendments to the Schengen Borders Code that came into force in 2013.⁸ Specifically, after those changes, Article 26 of the Code provides for exceptional circumstances allowing for the suspension of Schengen where the overall functioning of the free-movement area is put at risk as a result of persistent serious deficiencies relating to external border control.

In the meanwhile, all of the subsequent newcomers who arrived after 5 April 2011, mainly Sub-Saharan Africans residing in Libya when the Gheddafi’s regime collapsed, were somehow a priori classified as asylum seekers,⁹ and automatically channelled into the reception plan set up within ENA. The government established specific reception facilities outside the ordinary reception system SPRAR and put those facilities under the coordination initially of the Prefectures and then of the Civil Protection Service. Most of them were large-size collective centres concentrated in bigger cities and providing poor or no integration measures. This plan turned out to be a big failure. The majority of people hosted there were still homeless and jobless when, at the end of ENA in March 2013, they were abruptly expelled from those facilities so that some of them illegally occupied empty buildings (Marchetti, 2012; Ponzo et al., 2022; Pogliano & Ponzo, 2019).

It became clear that the rooted policy practices, i.e., fostering secondary movements and adopting reception emergency solutions, did not work so well in the new context, where unplanned flows towards Italy were boosted by the geopolitical instability in the Mediterranean area and the European partners became more demanding.

Against this backdrop, the state-managed Search and Rescue operation Mare Nostrum, started by Enrico Letta, Prime Minister of the then centre-left government, on 18 October 2013, in response to the tragic shipwreck of Lampedusa that had occurred 2 weeks earlier, can be regarded as the starting point of a new course.¹⁰ Mare Nostrum, by bringing people to the Italian shores under the coordination of the state, required that they be channelled through more structured paths, overcoming the contingent responses to spontaneous arrivals (interview with the Head of Italian Caritas’ Immigration Office, 11 December 2018). Most important, Mare Nostrum marked a shift in the Italian position towards Europe. It was indeed aimed at putting pressure on the EU within the struggle of Enrico Letta and his successor Matteo Renzi to fix the principle that the inflows triggered by the Arab Spring could not be an exclusive concern of Mediterranean Member States (Pastore & Roman, 2014; Panebianco, 2016). Hence, the idea of responsibility-sharing, namely the traditional concern of Northern European countries (Boswell & Geddes, 2011; Bendel & Ripoll Servent, 2018), suddenly became Italy’s main claim. The Joint Operation Triton that took over Mare Nostrum in October 2014 was a rather poor result in this respect since, beyond its much more limited assets, area of patrolling and mission, it kept bringing rescued people only to Italian ports (Pastore & Roman, 2014). Nevertheless, the revision of the old policy frames and practices did not stop.

A further confirmation of the new emerging course came from the epochal change that occurred in public discourse. Still in the first decade of the 2000s, the mechanisms for handling unwanted immigration in Italy were embedded in the economic legitimation of immigration (Finotelli & Sciortino, 2009), whereas in 2011–2013 the prevalent emphasis in public discourse shifted towards the humanitarian character of the crisis and Italian commitment (Marchetti, 2014), recalling the logics adopted by older asylum countries such as Germany (see Chap. 7).

Nevertheless, the established policy practices and frames were not dismantled altogether: secondary movements as a legitimate response to increasing inflows persisted. A case in point is that of over 80,000 Syrians and Eritreans stopping a few days in Milan to organise their journeys towards other countries. Almost none of them got fingerprinted and since October 2013 the Ministry of the Interior provided economic support to the Municipality of Milan through the local Prefecture in order to establish reception facilities to host transit refugees, while first-aid and information on journeys were provided at the Central Station (Pogliano & Ponzo, 2019). However, this practice became increasingly hard to implement and stopped in 2016, as we will see in the next section.

4 Coming of Age, When You Cannot Step Back Anymore: The European Refugee Crisis

The new course was reinforced and eventually institutionalised during the so-called European refugee crisis. Despite the skyrocketing arrivals registered between 2014–2016 (see Fig. 15.1), the emergency frame was abandoned in the public discourse and asylum was depicted as a structural phenomenon. Consistent with the strategy inaugurated by Enrico Letta, the emphasis was instead on the lack of support from the rest of Europe (Marchetti, 2014). On 23 June 2015, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi wrote in the national newspaper La Stampa: “The demand for peace and food that forces thousands of women and men, sometimes with their children, to risk death to reach Europe did not start today, it will not end tomorrow (…) We are a great country that does not get hysterical because a few thousand more refugees arrive in a year. If forced to go it alone, we will not step back (…) But having a European response would be useful to Europe first, then to Italy”¹¹ (translation by the Author).

In terms of regulations and practices, the Italian government started to pursue a “normalisation” in the management of asylum (interview with a high official in the Department for Civil Liberties and Immigration of the Ministry of the Interior, 12 October 2018). Indeed, after the end of ENA, the Italian government, in collaboration with the National Association of Italian Municipalities, the main national NGOs and the UN agencies started a phase of feverish reforms (interview with a high official of SPRAR Central Service, 17 July 2018) and avoided the adoption of any further emergency plan, whereas several older asylum countries, from Finland to Germany, implemented such plans in 2015–2016 to accommodate the booming numbers of asylum seekers (Caponio et al., 2019; Ponzo, 2022).

As a first step, the government mobilised in order to make up for the lack of places in the SPRAR system: in 2014, it adopted a National Plan for the relocation of asylum seekers which entitled the Prefectures to set up governmental reception facilities, called CAS (Extraordinary Reception Centres). Regrettably, the quality of services provided by CAS was extremely heterogeneous: CAS projects went from SPRAR-like solutions organised in apartments and aiming at peoples’ empowerment, to large-size isolated centres with no integration services. However, this also happened in old asylum countries because of the high pressure to rapidly multiply the available places (Caponio & Ponzo, 2022).

In order to reduce the gap between CAS and SPRAR, internal administrative regulations (Circolari) issued by the Ministry of the Interior in 2014 asked the Prefects to follow SPRAR’s guidelines and some of its key principles when setting up CAS centres.¹² Nevertheless, implementation remained jeopardised since the Prefectures, enjoying a high level of discretion and being poorly equipped for managing the governmental reception, complied with those directions to a very different extent (Ponzo et al., 2022).

A key step in this process of normalisation was the “Agreement between the Government, Regions and Local Authorities on the Implementation of the National Plan to face the extraordinary inflow of third country nationals, adults, families and unaccompanied minors” signed on 10 July 2014. It rationalised reception by articulating it into three categories, i.e., first aid and identification centres at disembarkation points, first-level reception at governmental facilities and second-level reception. Moreover, the Agreement acknowledged the principle of dispersed accommodation to prevent concentration in big cities as had occurred with ENA, and established an annual National Operational Plan on Asylum aimed at estimating the need for reception places and setting their distribution across the Italian regions.¹³

Many of those provisions were ratified by the Legislative Decrees adopted in 2015 and transposed the recast EU Directives on asylum issued in 2013. Hence, those Directives were mainly regarded as a “window of opportunity” to rationalise and gather into single laws the decisions made until then, rather than top-down impositions (Ponzo, 2022).

In the meantime, the pressure around secondary movements coming from the EU and the European partners increased. In September 2014 the Ministry of the Interior, acknowledging the complaints of other Member States in this regard, issued a Circolare that established tighter identification procedures¹⁴ (Caritas Roma, 2014). But it did not prove to be enough so that Italy’s full membership in CEAS and Schengen was called into play. In December 2015 the European Commission took the first step of an infringement procedure against Italy on the implementation of the Eurodac Regulation which provides for effective fingerprinting of asylum seekers and transmission of data to the Eurodac central system within 72 h.¹⁵ Moreover, between September and October 2015, neighbouring countries suspended Schengen and restarted border controls, with Germany and Austria raising the failure of Italy and Greece to apply the external border controls in their notifications to the European Commission. On 1 December 2015, the European Council published a proposal entitled “Integrity of the Schengen Area” (14,300/15) for the application of Article 26 of the Schengen Borders Code as modified in 2011 (see Sect. 15.3) and the reintroduction of internal border controls (Guild et al., 2015).

In this context, behaving as a transit country was no longer a viable option. Hence, the Italian government tried to bargain and used the systematic fingerprinting of newcomers as a currency of exchange to obtain more responsibility-sharing. This negotiation was ratified by the “European Agenda on Migration” launched at the end of 2015 under the EC Presidency of Jean-Claude Juncker. Together with Greece (see Chap. 16), Italy accepted the adoption of the so-called hotspot approach at disembarkation ports which is based on tight cooperation between Italian police forces, EU agencies (Frontex, EASO, EUROPOL) and international organisations (IOM and UNHCR) with the aim of registering and fingerprinting every newcomer who irregularly crosses the sea borders. As a consequence of this decision, the gap between sea arrivals and asylum applications lodged in Italy started to diminish in 2016 and completely closed in 2017, as shown in Fig. 15.1. In exchange, Italy obtained more responsibility-sharing, mainly embodied in the European “emergency relocation mechanism” of third-country nationals in clear need of international protection (i.e., belonging to nationalities with a high recognition rate) from frontline countries to other Member States.

Yet, the unbalanced implementation of the two components of the agreement was regarded as a sort of betrayal by the Italian government: on one hand, the number of asylum applicants fingerprinted and registered in Italy grew significantly; on the other hand, the relocation of asylum seekers was poorly implemented by other Member States providing the frontline states with a limited amount of relief. “The only ones that hosted refugees in a serious way with a great sacrifice of the population and elected politicians, as you can see from the last elections, are Italy, Germany, Sweden, even Norway and Switzerland, although the last is not in the EU. The others have refused to host anyone, despite everyone having signed the Juncker Agenda, leaving Greece and Italy completely alone and failing to honour their obligations” (interview with a high official of the Department for Civil Liberties and Immigration of the Ministry of the Interior, 12 October 2018).

In fact, secondary movements partially persisted but changed in nature: migrants started to apply for asylum in Italy and then moved towards other Member States on an irregular basis to seek jobs, returning to Italy to renew their permits (Hatziprokopiou et al., 2021). Therefore, Italy remains the state responsible for the asylum procedure, and secondary movements appear circular and related to the weak controls of both Italy and the destination countries, mainly France and Germany, rather than the result of a proactive Italian strategy to circumvent the Dublin Regulation, as when the state supported Syrians who were passing through Milan on their way to other European countries.

Meanwhile, the issue of the redistribution of asylum seekers across the country took a step forward. The idea of asylum seekers’ mandatory relocation was opposed by local authorities since it would have undermined the bottom-up approach of SPRAR which was rooted in the initiatives set up in the 1990s to accommodate former Yugoslavian refugees. A compromise was found at the end of 2016 and ratified in the so-called “Bari Agreement” signed by the National Association of Italian Municipalities and the Ministry of the Interior, establishing a specific quota of refugees per municipality, i.e., a ratio of 2.5 hosted asylum seekers per 1000 residents. This mechanism resembles the redistribution methods adopted in Northern Europe, such as the German distribution key (Königsteiner Schlüssel) where the distribution quota is calculated annually according to the tax revenue and the population of single federal states (Glorius, 2022). Moreover, this decision was accompanied by the so-called “safeguard clause” (clausola di salvaguardia)¹⁶: the municipalities whose SPRAR reception places met the above ratio would be exempted from the setting up of CAS by the Prefectures.

Thanks to the “safeguard clause” and an increase in the central government’s co-funding from 80% to 95%, in 2016 SPRAR places grew by 20% and reached a total of 26,000. However, this growth was still not enough to keep pace with new arrivals which were over 181,000, so CAS continued to cover the largest share of reception (Ponzo et al., 2022). Despite the limits of CAS facilities mentioned above, they have in fact played a key role in closing the gap with older European asylum countries and following their same rationales, i.e., providing accommodation to every newcomer regardless of the size and variation of the inflows.

Moreover, different from the limited-in-time solutions adopted in the 1990s and in 2011–2013 during ENA, CAS facilities have become a rather permanent component of the Italian reception system. This allowed the national authorities, generally under the pressure of civil society organisations, to develop strategies aimed at increasing CAS standards. Those improvements started in 2014, as explained above, and accelerated when Marco Minniti became Minister of the Interior in December 2016, under Paolo Gentiloni’s centre-left government. Since the end of 2017 the organisations managing CAS have been requested to submit balance checks together with supporting documents to the Prefectures, whereas before that they used to submit invoices only, with little accountability about how the money was spent.¹⁷

In that same year, the Ministry of the Interior adopted a new bid scheme for governmental centres¹⁸ according to which CAS should provide reception and integration services similar to those offered in SPRAR facilities, with the exception of legal assistance to prepare for the interview, vocational training and support for job seeking and housing seeking. Although CSOs criticised the lack of these services, the 2017 bid scheme contributed to harmonising service provision in CAS and to reduce the gap with SPRAR facilities.

With regard to the asylum procedures, as early as 2014, Law 146 increased the number of Territorial Commissions for the Recognition of International Protection from 10 to 20, with 30 local sections, and established that their members had to undergo a dedicated training delivered by UNHCR and EASO. The process for increasing the efficiency of asylum procedures accelerated with Legislative Decree 220/2017 (called the Minniti-Orlando Decree), converted into Law 46/2017, which entered into force on 31 January 2018 and introduced some crucial changes: the recruitment of ministerial officials with specific expertise to become permanent members of the Territorial Commissions, overcoming the turnover of different public entities’ representatives with little knowledge of asylum matters; the replacement of the UNHCR representatives with experts proposed by the UN agency but employed by the government; the establishment of 26 specialised court sections responsible for examining asylum appeals only, without however providing additional funding for this task; the suppression of the possibility to appeal a negative Civil Court decision before the Court of Appeal so that the applicant can only lodge an appeal before the Court of Cassation (for details see Roman, 2000).

To conclude, we can affirm that the Italian asylum regime has come of age: the country has finally recognised to be an asylum country and its general goals and rationales became similar to those of traditional European asylum destinations. Elements that were completely absent in the early 2000s are now taken for granted, such as codified disembarkation procedures, systematic fingerprinting, professional commissions for the recognition of international protection, specialised court sections and the right to reception for all asylum seekers without financial means. Moreover, greater responsibility-sharing within Europe has become the cornerstone of every Italian government’s migration policies regardless of its political colour.

5 Weak Political-Institutional Capacity: The Italian Asylum Regime’s Main Hurdle

Whereas modifications in the social phenomenon of migration and the new institutional settings have fostered policy change, the country’s weak political-institutional capacity, which results from a mix of the governments’ instability and a weak state capacity, has pushed towards the opposite direction. Indeed, it appears to be a substantial obstacle to the consolidation of the new policies, practices and regulations.

Governmental instability and the high politicisation of migration have always been crucial in defining the contradictions of Italian immigration policy (Sciortino, 2009; Finotelli & Echeverria, 2017). This has become particularly evident in the field of asylum over the last few years. In the second half of the 2010s, the frequent changes in the political colours of the short-lasting governments and their use of migration as an ideological flagship undermined the consolidation of the newly established policy practices. Reforms concerning asylum occurred almost every 2 or 3 years, with each piece of legislation partially dismantling the previous one – i.e. the laws adopted in 2015 to transpose the recast EU Directives, Legislative Decree 113/2018 on Security and Migration adopted by the Ministry of Interior Matteo Salvini, Decree 130/2020 adopted by the Ministry of Interior Luciana Lamorgese (for details see Ponzo et al., 2022). At the same time, those reforms seem to take the idea of Italy as a destination country for granted so that they offered the different governmental coalitions’ recipes to better manage the phenomenon and, as in other asylum countries, mainly focused on asylum seekers’ rights, i.e., the national forms of protection and eligibility for reception.

At the same time, the implementation of asylum policies has suffered from a weak state capacity which, in her seminal works, Skocpol (1979 and 1985) defines as whether a state is able to implement official goals. Following Geddes (1996), we could say that state capacity can be equated to the implementation power of the state, a task that falls under its bureaucracy. More precisely, Skocpol and Finegold (1982) argue that the success of a certain state programme depends largely on the availability of a professional independent bureaucracy made up of employees with proper training and experience in public policies, endowed with financial resources, able to collect data and conduct policy-oriented research and analytical work indispensable for all control programmes without relying on extra governmental experts and organisations, and holding a public-service perspective while maintaining constant relations with the major interest groups.

As for Italy, a comparative overview of public administration characteristics and performance in the EU28 (Thijs et al., 2018) shows how the country scores low on transparency and accountability, professionalism of civil servants, human resources management capacity and performance. In the specific field of migration, Finotelli and Echeverria (2017) underline how in Italy the lack of administrative staff, its inefficient selection procedures and the weak coordination of the bureaucratic apparatus have been major impediments to effective implementation of labour migration policies. Asylum policies seem to suffer from the same weaknesses. Yet, state capacity cannot be regarded as a fixed attribute: it varies over time and across domains (Skocpol & Finegold, 1982; Skocpol, 2008), as developments in the management of arrivals, asylum procedures and reception show.

The management of arrivals at sea has substantially improved since 2013, with fingerprinting becoming systematic and procedures after disembarkation being harmonised and codified with the contribution of UNHCR, IOM and EU agencies (Giannetto et al., 2019). On the other hand, the state still depends on UNHCR and other NGOs to provide assistance and information to migrants at arrival points, identifying vulnerable people and carrying out referrals.

State capacity has grown significantly in asylum procedures too, thanks to the establishment of specialised court sections and the recruitment of ministerial officials to make up the Territorial Commissions on the Recognition of International Protection in 2017, allowing the phasing out of the UNHCR, as explained in the previous section. At the same time, the backlog is still substantial: in January 2021 there were almost 34,000 pending claims in the Territorial Commissions and in June 2020 there were nearly 95,000 pending appeals in Courts, with a waiting time for the court’s decision between 15 months and 3 years.¹⁹

Regarding reception, state capacity has greatly expanded so that all asylum seekers without means now have access to some form of accommodation. Yet, governmental facilities are not under the coordination and monitoring of a migration-specific governmental agency or department, as in most other large EU receiving states, but rather under the responsibility of the Prefectures. Since the latter have not been adequately expanded and trained to properly manage those new tasks (Ponzo et al., 2022), several central governmental decisions over those facilities have remained on paper or have been implemented with wide territorial disparities and low accountability (Openopolis and Action Aid, 2018). Moreover, monitoring has been largely contracted out to UNHCR and other nongovernmental organisations through specific projects substantially co-funded by the EU (Giannetto et al., 2019).

To sum up, the state’s implementation power has substantially improved in various asylum domains but still falls short in some respects while national and international nongovernmental organisations compensate for the state’s lack of internal skills in performing specific tasks such as assistance at disembarkation and monitoring of reception. This limited state capacity, together with the above-mentioned regulation revisions promoted by every new government, undermines the consolidation of the new practices and hampers the ongoing policy change.

6 Concluding Remarks

The chapter challenges persistent stereotypes depicting Italy as a deviant laggard compared to older asylum countries. With this aim, I have analysed the policy change that has occurred over the last three decades by singling out policy frames and practices, showing how the country has passed from what I have called, using a biological metaphor, infancy to adulthood.

Indeed, after a long period of stability, over the last decade policy frames and practices have been evolving in response to the failure of the old approaches.²⁰ The main factors that led to those failures seem to be the modifications in the social phenomenon of migration (the sharp increase of unplanned inflows) and in the institutional settings where negotiations among Member States occur (the full inclusion of Italy into the Schengen Area and the CEAS). The resulting policy change consists of a new policy frame that acknowledges Italy as a destination country for asylum seekers and the implementation of new practices and regulations which overcome ad hoc emergency solutions. Moreover, Italy joined the older European asylum countries in the call for greater responsibility-sharing. Hence, European solutions are now actively pursued instead of being passively received as top-down impositions and possibly circumvented in practice, as happened in the past.

However, the country’s weak political-institutional capacity, by undermining the consolidation of the new practices, has hampered this policy change. This weakness has become one of the main explanatory factors of the gaps existing between Italy’s and older asylum countries’ asylum regimes whereas strategic divergence from EU partners has lost relevance.

In the current context, with the EU struggling to agree upon the management of refugees and increasing geopolitical instability in third countries, including Ukraine, it is difficult to say how Italy will deal with the dual pressure coming from a conflicting Europe and the unpredictable inflows, for which further research is needed.