Looking Into Policy Change: How the Italian Asylum Regime Came of Age

The chapter illustrates how Italy’s frames, strategies and practices concerning asylum have changed over the last three decades, and how the country has passed from what I have called, using a biological metaphor, infancy to adulthood. For a long time, European pressure and norms over asylum affected Italian legislation without significantly impacting policy frames and actual practices: Italy perceived itself as a transit country and, as a consequence, allowed and even fostered secondary movements of asylum seekers towards other countries and kept its asylum system underdeveloped. Since 2011, those solutions started failing because of the modifications in the social phenomenon of migration (the sharp increase of unplanned inflows) and in the institutional settings where negotiations among Member States occur (the full inclusion of Italy into the Schengen Area and the CEAS). Those failures resulted in a policy change so that the Italian asylum regime came of age: the country adopted a new policy frame by acknowledging itself as a destination country for asylum seekers, overcame ad hoc emergency solutions, and joined the Northern European countries’ call for more responsibility-sharing. However, Italy’s weak political-institutional capacity has slowed down the consolidation of the new practices. At the same time, it appears as largely responsible for the gaps with older destination countries in the management of asylum whereas divergence in policy frames and goals has lost relevance.