The Italian Border Management Policy Strategies

Abstract

Since the 1990s, the Italian migration and border management strategy has revolved around two main poles: (a) the attempt to prevent, deter and contain migration in collaboration with neighboring countries; (b) the routinized management (and filtering) of migrants reaching Italian shores based on the “turning a blind-eye” approach. Procedures adopted to manage migrants reaching Sicily included: the first aid and transfer of migrants in reception centres; their successive registration and identification; the sorting between forced (in need of protection) and voluntary (to be repatriated) migrants and the attribution of different legal statuses on the basis of this dichotomy. This overall strategy was consolidated over time. Since at least 2005–2006, mainstream humanitarian organizations started to be increasingly and systematically involved in the management of migration on the southern Italian border. Since the so-called refugee crisis of 2015, and at least until 2018, Italian governments adopted further restrictive policies in the attempt to contain migratory flows and to exclude migrants (i.e. the hotspot system of 2015 and the security decree of 2018).