Acting for Immigrants’ Rights: Civil Society and Immigration Policies in Italy

The argument of this paper is the development of local policies aimed to exclude migrants from various kinds of benefits and rights. It is based on a pilot research, conducted in Lombardy (northern Italy), on seventy cases, referred to forty-seven different local authorities. I define as local policies of exclusion the measures adopted by local authorities that aim to separate immigrants from the native component of the population, by establishing specific, albeit implicit, indirect or hidden prohibitions against them, setting up special screening procedures or limiting their access to benefits and resources of local social policies. These are therefore policies aimed at marking the boundaries of the legitimate local community, reinforcing a duality between rightful members (the insiders, coinciding with the native population or those of Italian nationality) and outsiders, whose right to residence tends to be redefined in more limited and conditional forms. Five types of exclusion can be detected in these local measures: civil exclusion, social exclusion, cultural exclusion, security exclusion, economic exclusion. Then, the outcome of these policies is studied: the exclusion of migrants is a tool to seek political consent, but is also a battlefield, where anti-discrimination institutions, advocacy groups and courts react against the measures approved by local authorities. The paper analyzes the battles conducted by voluntary associations of lawyers, connected to other civil society actors, against the xenophobic policies of local governments. On the other side, some examples of campaigns for migrants rights are considered: above all, the campaign for a new law on citizenship for young people of migrant origin.