6 Immigration Lessons from Italy (What Not to Do)

The failings of Italy's immigration law were made painfully and embarrassingly clear last week after two ships packed with over 700 refugees went down off the Italian island of Lampedusa. So far over 300 dead bodies have been recovered. The drownings have shone a spotlight on the disfunctional Italian immigration system, its negligent and overcrowded refugee camps, and its punitive legal treatment of migrants. 

Immigrant must check in with police on a regular basis.

6 Immigration Lessons from Italy

Italy’s current immigration law is a hardline, enforcement first measure. Know as Bossi-Fini , after its co-authors, the 2002 law greatly restricts legal immigration, abolishes many social services for immigrants, makes it difficult for children born in Italy to non-Italian parents to become citizens, and generally treats immigration as a law enforcement issue. In effect, the law is an anti-immigration measure, based on the notion that criminalization and zero-tolerance will repel migrants (illegal and legal). 

  

The problems of this approach are plain to see:

1.  By making legal immigration almost impossible, Italy has ensured that it receives only that form of immigration that is born of desperation. All those with skills and options, are driven elsewhere by bureaucratic barriers and government hostility. Its hardline immigration approch has resulted in exactly the clandestine migration it feared. 

Punitive legal measures that criminalize migrants, Italy have NOT prevented inflows of people. What these punitive measures have done is to make sure that those immigrants that do end up in Italy, often by harrowing illegal journeys during which they are at the mercy of criminal human trafficking cartels, have greater needs, are torn from their families, and have fewer social and economic resources at their disposal to make a new life for themselves. Once they are in country, their 'criminal' status renders them more vulnerable to abuse and fearful of authority. 

Graffiti in an immigrant social squat in Rome.

2. In addition to restricting legal immigration, Bossi-Fini also makes gaining Italian citizenship difficult for children born in Italy, to non-Italian parents. The result of this measure is to create a class of people who are born and raised as Italians, but who don't have the legal rights of citizenship. Thus, long term immigrants are prevented from putting down roots in the country. The result is a class of "guest workers" who live in Italy but heve neither full rights nor a stake in the future of the country.

4. Although Bossi-Fini allow for the the granting of asylum to refugees, there is little provision for how to deal with their presence. The asylum system is so starved of funds to the point of shame. Refugees spend years in overcrowded and underfunded camps. The  camp in Lampedusa was built for 200. It houses over a thousand, including unaccompanied minors mixed with adults. 

5. The idea that refugees, who are fleeing abject poverty of political violence will be deterred by the threat of a monetary fine is absurd and delegitimizes the justice system that has to prosecute helpless victims.  The magistrate charged with prosecuting the wretched souls who survived the shipwrecks last week spoke of his shame at enforcing the law. 

6. Italy itself is the victim of a European Union measure that required refugee seekers to stay in the country they first set foot in. Thus Italy, and Greece and Malta and Spain, poor countries by EU standards, are forced to carry a disproportionate share of refugees seeking entry to Europe. The last irony of Bossi-Fini is that most of the refugees and immigrants in the Italian anti-immigration system want to leave the country.