Sailing against the law tides: implications of the 2018 refugee reception reform in small-medium towns and rural areas in Italy

Introduction

Following the sudden increase of asylum applications in 2015, Italy, like other EU countries, has increasingly adopted a dispersal policy allocating reception facilities in Small-medium Towns and Rural Areas (henceforth called STRAs). This recent dynamic has promoted studies on the implications that the reception of forced migrants may have for local territories. Although research has revealed discrepant reactions from local communities, the presence of refugee reception initiatives has also shown transformative potential, especially for non-urban territories where the arrival of forced migrants is a relatively new and challenging phenomenon. In the Italian context, some STRAs communities have been responsive settings in terms of activating and experimenting with innovative solutions for asylum seeker and refugee inclusion. What is surprising is that such virtuous interconnections between STRAs and the reception initiatives have also emerged as unplanned outcomes, enabled, but not intended, by the national laws. We are, of course, aware that this is only one part of the story, considering that public expenditures and the social risks of reception are highly debated in the political discourse and represent a controversial issue. However, the nexus between territory and the asylum-reception system has been scarcely addressed so far, especially outside large cities and in non-urban settings. Moreover, we believe the transformative potential of such a nexus should be further investigated and taken into account when analysing (and reforming) the reception system.

The so-called Security Decree, released at the end of 2018, steered the reception system in a different direction, putting its actual functioning at the local level and the virtuous interconnections that were emerging under pressure. These interconnections were neither recognised nor addressed by the regulatory changes. We consider the 2018 Decree not only a turning point in which the transformative potential of reception for STRAs territories and communities was jeopardised, but also as an analytical device: by putting under pressure, and sometimes disrupting, the existing interconnections between territory and reception, the 2018 Decree contributed to making these interconnections visible. On this basis, this paper proposes a qualitative analysis of three refugee reception experiences in STRAs across Italy to highlight the virtuous interconnections that were emerging between reception and territory and how the Decree has put them in jeopardy.

The paper contains seven sections. Following the introduction, the second section presents the legal and socio-political framework in which Italy’s reception system has evolved, while the third discusses the territory-reception nexus through literature, underlining the importance of exploring it in depth, especially outside large urban centres. The fourth introduces the analytical framework of the paper, proposing a model to analyse those interconnections that emerged from the virtuous management of reception in some STRAs and were then jeopardised by the 2018 Decree. The framework can be understood as a matrix consisting of the intersection of two pairs: material-symbolic, regarding the aspects that are observed, and within around, concerning the orientation of the observation. The fifth section describes the methodology adopted and presents the case studies, while the sixth analyses the interconnections between territory and reception before and after the Decree in each of the case studies in the light of the analytical framework previously described. Finally, the conclusions summarise the main findings and propose a reflection on the paradox created by the 2018 Decree in which the need to cut expenses and promote security instead created further insecurity and fragmentation.

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