The European spirit of the immigration bill, and why humanity is not enough

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Last week, the Italian government approved the new immigration bill. By a grim coincidence, the new measures were announced in the very days when around a thousand migrant women, men and children were losing their lives in the Mediterranean during cyclone Harry, with the now habitual complicity of a government that once again refrained from activating extraordinary search-and-rescue procedures. The new bill is a product of a Europe at war because it feeds on an entrenched militarism that normalises border violence and treats migrants’ lives as a price to be paid for public order and national security. It is a product of a Europe at war because it shows how, behind the loudly proclaimed commitment of European governments and institutions to defending national and continental borders, lies the objective of making migrants’ living and working conditions even more precarious and irregular, exposing them to exploitation and to the threat of summary detention and accelerated deportation. It is a product of a Europe at war because it brings to completion the long process of dismantling the right to asylum, abruptly accelerated in recent years, and takes advantage of the new European pacts and regulations—due to enter into force in June—to relaunch deportation programmes to centres in Albania.

With the recent amendments to the asylum procedures regulation approved by the European Parliament, the European Union has not merely equipped itself with a common list of «safe countries of origin», destined to produce a wave of rejections that will increase the number of undocumented migrants available for exploitation or more swiftly returned to the hands of dictators and torturers. The most significant change concerns the possibility for member states to send asylum seekers to a «safe third country» even in the absence of family ties or of prior transit during their journey to Europe. Bilateral or multilateral agreements will suffice to externalise border procedures, permanently delegating the management, detention and pushback of migrant women and men to increasingly authoritarian governments eager for financial rewards and international recognition. With the new bill, the Italian government has promptly aligned itself with this further step in the Europe-wide reorganisation of what amounts to a genuine logistics of deportation. From now on, the executive will have the authority to impose temporary bans on access to territorial waters during periods of «exceptional migratory pressure», periods in which humanitarian ships will in practice be prevented from operating—under threat of sanctions and confiscation—and migrant women and men may be redirected to a designated safe third country.

The commitment of the racists in government is fully in line with the «European spirit on migration» recently invoked by the Commissioner for Home Affairs and Migration, Magnus Brunner, who commented on the Spanish government’s decision to regularise nearly one million sin papeles—a measure achieved after years of mobilisation by migrant and anti-racist movements—by warning that exiting illegality risks becoming a blank cheque for uncontrolled movement across the Schengen area. This European spirit, on the one hand, further legitimises the rhetoric of «remigration», a flagship demand of the right wing that sees in Trump’s violence a model to emulate; on the other, it confirms that migrants’ illegality cannot be easily dispensed with. Rather, illegality remains a condition to be actively produced through legislation and sustained through everyday practices of institutional racism so that migrant labour can continue to be exploited and blackmailed without ever foreclosing the possibility of detention and deportation. Along these lines, the new bill expands the range of offences for which judges may issue expulsion orders, introduces accelerated procedures for the deportation of detainees, and removes the possibility for those who arrived in Italy as unaccompanied minors to access reception pathways in the years immediately following legal age. It also implements the long-anticipated tightening of family reunification and complementary protection, establishing stricter access criteria in terms of income, length of residence, language proficiency and housing conditions, with the declared aim of limiting the «instrumental use» of the few channels still available to migrant women and men seeking to rebuild their lives in Italy.

Just as in Germany under its new ally Merz—where since the beginning of the year admissions to language and cultural courses for foreigners have been halted, effectively dismantling one of the emblematic policies of the German integration model—migrant women and men are reduced to unwanted guests who, when it is neither convenient nor possible to dispose of them quickly, must be put to work only to the extent necessary to guarantee a steady supply of low-cost labour in the most struggling sectors, through selective and tightly controlled border openings that make exploitation the only viable legal path into Europe. Not by chance, since the Cutro shipwreck, the government’s crackdown on migrants’ freedom of movement has gone hand in hand with a politics of flows that, by steadily increasing entries and favouring ever more direct and flexible employer control over their management, reinforces the patriarchal and racist hierarchies of the wage regime. Once any residual prospect of gradual improvement has been cleared away, migrants are made to bear the harshest consequences of processes that—across the European space, from Greece to Germany, from France to Austria, Belgium and Portugal, and of course Italy—shape fiscal plans and spending strategies with the aim of actively producing a workforce increasingly ready to accept lower wages and greater precarity.

For this reason, fighting racism in a Europe at war cannot mean merely reasserting the perspective of humanitarian reception or invoking ever more elusive rights for all. Even necessary struggles—such as those against remigration campaigns, against the criminalisation of doctors who refused to certify migrants as fit for detention, or against the construction of a new detention centre in Emilia-Romagna, once again placed on the agenda by the racist and securitarian outbursts of regional president De Pascale—must not lose sight of the conditions migrant women and men confront every day and against which, with growing difficulty, they continue to push back: the institutional racism of police headquarters in the endless renewal procedures and the blackmail of an increasingly precarious residence permit, the intensification of exploitation, and political and social isolation. The attack on migrants’ mobility, labour and lives determines—through a relentless race to the bottom—working conditions, wage levels and access to social benefits for everyone. In the face of all this, the struggle on the side of migrant women and men cannot be reduced to a purely humanitarian response, nor can it presume to replicate experiences drawn from other contexts, such as the struggles in Minneapolis against ICE. What is needed instead is a space of political communication across different subjects and increasingly isolated conditions, capable of building a collective refusal of exploitation, oppression and the patriarchal and racist militarism on which this Europe at war feeds.