Italy Declares Immigration State of Emergency in Latest Anti-Immigrant Move

In April 2023, Italy’s far-right government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, announced the start of a six-month immigration state of emergency explicitly designed to address an increase in migrants arriving on the southern coastline after crossing the Mediterranean Sea. The government pledged five million Euros to back this enforcement effort, using these funds to construct and upgrade migrant processing centers and shelters to more quickly and efficiently determine which migrants are eligible for humanitarian protections in Italy and which ones will be returned to their home countries.

This most recent immigration state of emergency is not without precedent. In 2011, the country issued a state of emergency due to tens of thousands of Tunisians arriving in Italy due to the Tunisian revolution. Most of these migrants flooded into the small island of Lampedusa, overwhelming the local authorities and leading to an enforcement-heavy approach that included deploying additional security personnel to stop the migration outflows from Tunisia.

State of emergency issuances are not the only anti-immigrant stances employed by Meloni since assuming power in October 2022. Since then, the government has made its immigration agenda clear in multiple ways. One was a highly publicized dispute with France over the treatment of the migrant rescue ship Ocean Viking after Italy refused to allow it to dock at an Italian port, forcing the ship to stay at sea for two weeks before France allowed it to unload over 200 passengers in Toulon. Another was when Agriculture Minister Francesco Lollobrigida, Meloni’s brother-in-law, claimed that foreigners were ethnically replacing Italians because Italians did not have enough children. These claims of ethnic replacement are very similar to the ones used in the Great Replacement Theory popular among far-right groups in the United States. The proliferation of these types of sentiments in Italy, the United States, and the rest of Europe and the world is making immigration responses a much higher priority on policy agendas worldwide. However, the current response trend is to treat the situation as a security threat rather than a humanitarian priority. This type of thinking is concerning to any future where migrants in need of protection will be able to secure them in a safe, orderly, and timely process.

Italy argues that these policy responses are being implemented to address the region's increasingly worsening humanitarian crisis. Between January and March 2023, more than 20,000 migrants arrived in Italy, more than a 300 percent increase compared to the same timeframe in 2022. Additional data points support the exponential escalation of the severity of the situation. In 2022, more than 105,000 migrants reached Italy, a significant increase from the 67,000 who arrived in 2021, nearly twice as many as the 34,000 who came in 2020. Additionally, the Mediterranean crossing is the most dangerous migration route in the world, with around 27,000 missing migrants recorded since 2014 by the UN’s Missing Migrant Project. Over 60 percent of these deaths and disappearances occur in the central Mediterranean, with Italy as the final destination. Italy uses these rising statistics and arrivals as justification for its actions and calls for more support from other European countries to address the migrant situation.

Italy’s relationship with the EU over the migration response has been adversarial for years, even preceding the Meloni government. In 2016, Italy’s former prime minister Matteo Renzi called on the EU to cut funding to member states who did not agree to help resettle migrants who arrived in Italy, mainly focusing on Eastern European countries which he argued received the benefits of EU membership without assuming some of its responsibilities. Countries like Poland and Hungary refused to accept refugees, mainly Muslims from the Syrian conflict, due to their desire to preserve the ethnic makeup of their countries. In 2022, Italy, along with Cyprus, Greece, Malta, and Spain, criticized the EU’s “voluntary” solidarity policy allowing countries not on the front line of the migrant crisis to pledge to help resettle these refugees. However, many of these countries did not make any effort to assist; if they did, they did not fully carry out their promised resettlement quotas. In 2023, the president of the southern Italian region of Calabria chastised the EU’s lack of action, questioning, “What has the European Union been doing all these years?” while Prime Minister Meloni called on the EU to do more to address human traffickers and illegal migration to Europe.

NGOs and legal experts have quickly criticized Meloni’s government for its response and approach to the migrant situation. A law was passed in January 2023 that requires migrant rescue ships operating in the Mediterranean Sea to head to a port directly after picking up migrants instead of completing multiple rescues before returning to Italian shores. Failure to comply would warrant a 50 thousand Euro fine and confiscation of the ship. This law has received criticism from NGOs like SOS Mediterranee and Doctors Without Borders because it is a blatant attempt to reduce the number of migrants that can be brought to Italian shores. The law implies that now migrant rescue ships will have to work harder to save the same number of people as they did before the law while expending more time and resources to do so. Given that these organizations are NGOs and donor-driven, a real possibility exists that fewer migrants will be rescued and more will die, making the central Mediterranean migration route only exceedingly more dangerous. Additionally, organizations like SOS Humanity and multiple Italian law and legal experts have called Italy’s policy of not allowing the debarkation of migrants rescued in the Mediterranean Sea a violation of international law.

Given the current position of the Italian government towards the migrant situation, it has become clear that outside pressures and bodies must step in to improve the humanitarian crisis and to provide an orderly process for migrants to be able to receive the protections they are eligible for. Within Italy, NGOs and other grassroots organizations will be crucial to provide the humanitarian protection needs that recently arrived migrants demand, such as housing, clothing, food, and medical care. Outside Italy, the EU is the main governmental body that can push for change. The EU must create a unified migration policy to be applied throughout the region that contains its fundamental values, the responsibilities of each member state, the rights of migrants, and enforcement mechanisms to ensure that member states are fulfilling their duties. While the EU is currently undergoing the process of creating such a policy, it must ensure that the aspects listed above are contained within it. If not, the situations occurring in Italy and elsewhere will only continue with no coordinated response to provide the humanitarian protections that migrants are seeking. This potential reality can be a driving force to attract support from traditionally anti-immigrant political leaders in Italy and beyond. The options are clear: support humanitarian protections now or be forced to deal with a bigger future problem.

Author: Joshua Rodriguez

Managing Editor: Sebastian Reyes

Web Editor: Anusha Tamhane