Immigration, Public Opinion, and the Italian Political System

Once again in 2011 the immigration issue occupied a central position in the Italian political system. Even in a year in which economic questions captured much of the attention of the principal actors (the institutions, political parties, media and public opinion), this issue managed to remain a constant presence on the public agenda. It should not of course be excluded that the economic crisis and the concerns linked to it, though not completely overshadowing immigration, may have contributed to changing in part its significance, reshaping the definition of the problem in the eyes of the actors. The present chapter of the Report, divided into two parts, intends to explore the dynamics that immigration has triggered inside the political system, in other words to investigate how it was perceived and handled over the course of 2011. First, we will examine some data and interpretations of the orientations of public opinion. Secondly, we will analyse the policy offerings that political parties formulated in response to the questions posed by public opinion. To this end, we will examine the principal elec-toral programmes presented in May for the local elections of four major cities. Third, we will analyse the black box, that is the decision-making process of the political system, not so much to highlight its working mechanisms, but rather to investigate what (and especially how much) was produced over the period of time under consid-eration. We will look at the legislative production of the central government and several Italian Regions in order to assess the importance of the migration question in relation to the policies produced. In the second part, the goal is to show the political system in a dynamic dimen-sion, by reconstructing the decision-making processes, the positions of the actors over time, their preferences, and the interests in play regarding three significant facts of 2011: 1) the arrival of thousands of people from North Africa on the coasts of the island of Lampedusa, and the war in Libya. The attention of public opinion, the media and policy makers was focused for many weeks on these events, due to several aspects of an exceptional character. The war in Libya, while technically a matter of foreign policy, had implications in terms of the migration flows from the war.