Italy: the new migration bill - an honourable compromise?
01 May 1997
Italy shares with other so called "new countries of immigration" such as Portugal and Spain the speed by which, after being "socially" discovered and acknowledged as a new reality, immigration has been constructed as a pressing social problem. The potential "flood" is, accordingly, addressed by restrictive legislation. Legislation is usually presented and legitimised as a given necessity to be part of the Schengen club. More precisely the Italian migratory legislation has been characterised by a contradictory mix of increasingly restrictive measures on new entries, always matched by liberal provisions of regularisation: in 1986, in 1990 and in 1995.
Such a compromise oriented approach is a mark of the new bill approved by the Council of Ministers on 14 February which, on the one hand introduces very illiberal measures such as the temporary camp for undocumented migrants waiting the implementation of expulsion orders, while on the other allegedly increases the sphere of social rights for regular immigrants and grants them active and passive voting rights in municipal elections.
Presenting the bill to the press Romano Prodi, the Prime Minister, emphatically stressed that it signals the end of the politics of emergency in dealing with immigration and the beginning of a new era of "governed migration". Indeed the government proposal, consisting of seven sections and a total of 46 articles, is quite ambitious and addresses three separate issues: "the struggle against undocumented immigration and smuggling syndicates", the regulation of labour migration through a system of annual quotas the improvement of rights provision to documented immigrants.
The ambivalent character of the bill is clearly confirmed by the way in which the government has presented the law to the media. On the one hand, various members of the government and MPs of the Ulivo (meaning Olive tree, the name of the electoral centre-left coalition which won the elections in April 1996) have emphasised that the measures aimed at fighting undocumented migration will bring Italy closer to Schengen, an effort that, as put it by the Minister of interior Giorgio Napolitano, "must be acknowledged by our European partners" (Il Sole, 24 ore, 14.2.97). On the other hand, the slogan of "un percorso di cittadinanza" (a path to citizenship) has been constructed to present the progressive side of the bill - a compromise to pass the entry exam of the Schengen criteria and also to appease the centre-right opposition. At the same time it gives the bill a progressive character as would be expected of a centre-left government. A thorough scrutiny of the bill, however, shows that, while the restrictive side will actually make legal entries more difficult and the guarantee of human rights weaker, the sections concerning the provisions of more rights to regular immigrants remains vague and its scope questionable.
The restrictive measures mainly concern the procedures for expulsions and their implementation. The bill sets two types of administrative expulsion: one exceptional that can be decided only by the Ministry of Interior for reasons of public order and security, the other ordinary and issued by the prefects for those who enter undocumented or did not renew their residence permit or turn out to be "socially dangerous". The major innovation is the establishment of "centri di permanenza e assistenza temporanea" whereby individuals, whose expulsion orders cannot be immediately implemented, will be gathered. NGOs such as the Lega Anti-Razzismo, the Green party and the left wing of the coalition have strongly criticised these measures doubting their constitutionality. The biweekly Solidarieta Come (Solidarity How), a publication sold by immigrants, has commented on the bill with the telling headline "A Police State" (no 29, 1.3.97) stressing how it contributes to the process of securitisation of immigration. Naturally the new restrictive measure on entries and expulsion h