The inclusiveness of the Italian framework on migrants' healthcare is indisputable "on the book". However, we might wonder how access takes shape at the front-line of the healthcare system in an increasingly hostile institutional and discursive environment. By focusing on Italian migration and healthcare policies and of health workers' practices in their encounters with migrants in irregular situation, this contribution analyses how institutional tensions are dealt with by -and simultaneously shape -workers' narratives and actions. It suggests that individual positioning plays a major role in favouring the adoption of discretional practices of care or control. Yet, daily practices are also mediated by the wider institutional and discursive landscape, which has been increasingly characterized by a tension between a medicalhumanitarian logic on the one hand, which legitimates the provision of healthcare to vulnerable migrants, and a control-oriented logic on the other, concerning immigration and health expenditure.

Since multiple crises are currently affecting Europe, interest on changes in intra-EU mobility patterns, policies and EU movers' strategies of integration has re-emerged in academic debates. What seems to still lack to date is a focus on the chaining actors linking the macro level of policies and the micro level of individual strategies, that is, civil servants who are in charge of implementing national policies in their daily encounters with EU citizens. Through an in-depth qualitative analysis of formal policies and daily practices in the field of healthcare for EU citizens in Piedmont, in the North of Italy, this contribution analyses how EU citizens' right to free movement and equal access to social protection is officially framed and concretely enacted within the boundaries of the Italian National Healthcare System and the role of health workers as de facto citizenship-makers. It suggests that, along with managerial orientations, different evaluations of the Italian economic and financial situation, and of EU citizens' root motivations behind their decisions to move across Europe play a crucial role in shaping health workers' assessments of EU citizens' deservingness of healthcare.

La importancia de proteger la salud de las personas inmigrantes ha sido ampliamente reconocida como condición necesaria para responder eficazmente a la pandemia del COVID-19, subrayando la necesidad de garantizar que todas ellas, independientemente de su situación administrativa, tengan acceso a la atención sanitaria. En este contexto, este artículo pasa revista brevemente a las principales medidas adoptadas en materia de inmigración y atención sanitaria en distintos países europeos y se centra, específicamente, en el caso español. Al respecto, destaca que poco se ha hecho para reducir las vulnerabilidades de los grupos inmigrantes frente a la COVID-19. Avanzar en esa dirección hubiera requerido desarrollar iniciativas para eliminar las barreras lingüísticas, organizativas y administrativas que impiden el pleno acceso de estas poblaciones a las medidas de prevención, diagnóstico y contención del virus.

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