Dispersal and Reception in Northern Italy: Comparing Systems Along the Brenner Route

Abstract

In the last decades, policy restrictions and practices at national and local levels have curtailed the rights of seekers and holders of international protection, thus impacting on their lives and on the territories they transit through. This is particularly evident in border contexts. Various border areas have gradually transformed into internal hotspots, with increasing border enforcement. This includes Brenner, situated at the border between Italy and Austria. In the wider Brenner route area, particularly in the nearby Italian cities of Verona, Trento and Bolzano, “spaces of transit” have emerged and both public and humanitarian actors have been “forced” to deal with it. This chapter draws upon the work of the multilevel governance of migration (Caponio and Borkert 2010), and on the proliferation of borders (Mezzadra and Neilson 2016), to present a comparative analysis of the reception scenario in these three cities. By building on qualitative data analysis (legal analysis of policy documents, content analysis of interviews and newspaper articles), it discusses to what extent and how the respective local systems of reception have managed to cater for migrants that transit through them. Similarities and differences are pointed out, as well as the relevance of factors such as geographical proximity in influencing the respective approaches.

Sailing against the Law Tides

“…Italy's reception system for asylum seekers and refugees 1 has a troubled, twentyyear history, constantly evolving under the pressures of increasing asylum applications (e.g., the peak in asylum applications following the Arab Spring, with 37,350 applications in 2011, and the Syrian crisis, reaching 128,850 applications in 2017) 2 and the high level of politicisation of asylum issues. Indeed, in the absence of a permanent organic view, Italy's reception system has evolved from being imagined as a locally managed and nationally organised system for both refugees and asylum seekers, aiming to provide high-level integration services, into a patchwork system in which reception standards differ for asylum seekers and people with recognised status of international protection (i.e., refugees) and are inconsistent across Italy (Giannetto et al 2019;Omizzolo 2019;Semprebon/Pelacani 2019;Openpolis/ ActionAid 2021). This situation has not been particularly impacted even by the transposition of Asylum Reception Conditions Directive 2013/33/EU 3 (substituting Directive 2003/9/EU), which left broad margins of discretion on the defi nition of national reception conditions.…”

“…8 Moreover, almost half of the 1,189 municipalities that in 2018 formed the SPRAR/SIPROIMI network had less than 5,000 inhabitants (Servizio Centrale 2019). Dispersal policies have been implemented in Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, to ensure a certain level of "burden" sharing among regions and between urban and non-urban areas (Campomori 2018;Semprebon/Pelacani 2019). While the CAS system grew disproportionately in some areas due to the emergency approach of the fi rst years of the "refugee crisis," with collective centres with high numbers of refugees appearing suddenly in abandoned hotels in remote areas with few residents, the SPRAR/SIPROIMI has always followed the logic of dispersed and small-scale accommodation, usually in apartments.…”

Deservingness and Uneven Geographies of Asylum Accommodation

“…In 2015, at the height of the so-called European migration crisis, the Italian government instituted a new typology of reception centres for asylum seekers. An emergency response to a recurrent structural problem (Ambrosini, 2020), these centres were set up to obviate the capacity limitations of the 'ordinary' reception system, consisting of first-tier identification and screening centres, and second-tier facilities aimed at facilitating the integration of asylum seekers and refugees (Semprebon and Pelacani, 2020). The Extraordinary Reception Centres (Centri di Accoglienza Straordinaria, or CAS henceforth) set up in 2015 resolved the capacity limitations of the ordinary reception system by granting Prefetture (the provincially decentralised offices of the Ministry of Interior) the authority to institute them through a Public Tender bypassing the involvement, or indeed the consent, of the municipal administrations in whose territory CAS were opened (Novak, 2019).…”

‘Tuscans are different’: the cognitive dimension of local asylum policymaking during the 2015 European ‘refugee crisis’

“…In this context, several scholars have analysed the asylum (or 'reception') policies adopted by local governments during the 'refugee crisis', distinguishing between inclusive or exclusive local policies and passive or proactive policy approaches (Ambrosini 2018;Sabchev 2020;Schammann et al 2021), and identifying the factors that contributed to produce these different policies. In particular, scholarly works have focused on structural or contextual factors (Rea et al 2019;Castelli Gattinara 2017;Glorius et al 2019;Semprebon and Pelacani 2020;Whyte et al 2019;Zorlu 2017), institutional factors and multi-level governance arrangements (Geuijen et al 2020;de Graauw and Vermeulen 2016), and political and strategic factors (Haselbacher 2019;Hernes 2017;Lidén and Nyhlén 2015;Martínez-Ariño et al 2019;Myrberg 2017).…”