COORDINAMENTO MIGRANTI BOLOGNA
The renewal of the memorandum of understanding between Italy and Libya automatically took effect at the beginning of November, after a month during which more than seventy migrants died in the Mediterranean Sea. A few days later, the army of the provisional government in Tripoli – which, together with Meloni and Erdoğan, shares the search for common solutions to the «migration challenge» – carried out drone strikes on the port of Zuwara to stop departures, killing three migrants. The protocol of understanding between Italy and Albania shows no sign of having a short life either: the Rome Court of Appeal has referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union the decision on whether the agreement is lawful within the framework of the common European asylum system, but, likely, the final ruling will not come for at least two years, during which thousands of migrants will continue to face summary procedures, detention and expulsion. In the meantime, the Pact on migration and asylum and the new rules on repatriations will enter into force at the European level. This will dispel any remaining reservations about the Albania model, according to the Italian government and the European Commission.
The politics of deaths at sea and of deportations beyond the border remain the most visible and violent manifestations of institutional racism, but the measures and initiatives put in place daily by the government, police headquarters, and prefectures with the aim of exacerbating the precarity of migrant women and men continue to multiply. The latest, in chronological order, is yet another racist brainwave from Minister Salvini, who has presented a new package of proposals on «security and immigration» featuring the introduction of a points-based residence permit system, the shortening of the reception period in facilities for unaccompanied foreign minors, and a further tightening of access to family reunification. Already last year, the governing majority had doubled the period of «legal and uninterrupted stay» required to apply for reunification. Now, the new «deterrence measures» provide not only for a restrictive intervention in the few situations that European law leaves to the discretion of member states, but also for raising income thresholds needed to access one of the last available paths for migrant women and men to exercise a freedom of movement not subordinated to the demands of the labour market.
The widespread racist rhetoric according to which family reunification represents an unsustainable burden on the public finances is the same rhetoric underpinning both the constant reduction of staff in immigration offices in police headquarters and prefectures – forcing thousands of migrants to wait months to demand international protection or renew their residence permit – and the increasingly frequent use of reception withdrawals, through which asylum seekers are systematically pushed back into irregularity which, while increasing the possibility of detention and deportation, ensures the rapid turnover of a low-wage labour force within places of exploitation. In this sense, the offensive against family reunification – together with the majority’s amendments to the budget law aiming to further depress migrant wages and incomes by taxing remittances and including them in the equivalent economic situation index – represents the latest chapter in the attack on all forms of mobility not organised according to the needs of migrant labour, an attack that continues to be waged in Europe at war. From the United Kingdom, where the Labour government has announced that it will restrict access to reception and welfare for migrants while increasing the period required to obtain a stable permit to twenty years, to Spain, where the Socialist government has funded the construction of identification and expulsion centres for asylum seekers in Mauritania.
Italy is not isolated on the issue of reunification either. In Austria, family reunification applications have been suspended since March, when the governing coalition of conservatives, social democrats, and liberals halted them on the grounds that they posed a threat to national security. Germany, Finland, and Belgium have adopted sharply restrictive measures, denying the possibility of applying for reunification to holders of certain forms of international protection or introducing tighter access requirements based on length of stay or economic conditions. Yet the horizon of these policies is not the impenetrable Fortress Europe imagined by the enthusiasts of «remigration», nor the fantasy of sealed borders that President Trump continues to evoke on the other side of the ocean, as shown by the recent decision to drastically reduce the number of refugees admitted to the United States in 2026 (except for the victims of the alleged «white genocide» in South Africa). Attempts to forcefully recompose the transnational disorder produced by the autonomous movements of migrants are countered by productive and reproductive needs increasingly governed by the imperatives of growth, competitiveness, and rearmament, the fulfilment of which necessarily requires the controlled and selective border openings that capital continues to call for as the solution to labour shortages in specific sectors.
Not by chance, after abolishing the possibility of converting special protection into a work permit, the Italian government has not only gradually increased the quotas for entries under the flows decrees (a trend confirmed for the next three years by the draft law currently debated in Parliament), but it has above all sought to promote ever more direct and flexible employers’ management of these entries according to profit requirements. Over the past year, limits on the number of clearance applications that sectoral associations can submit have been removed and employer checks have been outsourced, while the time windows for submitting applications have been expanded, as have out-of-quota entries for workers who have taken part in training programmes in their home countries, especially in sectors linked to large-scale industry (while the plan to remove all caps on entries for domestic workers employed in caring for the elderly and disabled has fallen through, at least for this year). The ambition is to organise an orderly recruitment of migrant labour according to the needs of the economic phase, to neutralise, as far as possible, its tendency towards mobility, namely the refusal of certain working and wage conditions. In this setting, the primary function of the politics of flows is no longer to regularise the situation of those who have long lived and worked in Italy, as demonstrated by the ever-lower percentages of entries leading to stable employment contracts and long-term residence permits. The aim, instead, is to constrain the mobility of migrant labour to guarantee the availability of a workforce on specific terms and in particular sectors. Meanwhile, every attempt at organizing continues to be forcefully repressed, as in the case of the workers on strike in the textile district of Prato. As violence becomes increasingly visible on Europe’s internal and external borders, the coercive imposition of exploitation and precarity becomes the only possible rule in the current war scenario.
The government of migrant labour emerges as a political stake in the war not only because the rising militarist ideology constantly needs to identify internal enemies on whom to project anger, dissatisfaction, and resentment for one’s own worsening living conditions, by brandishing security threats and pointing to supposed privileges to dismantle in the name of new spending priorities. The authoritarian deepening of capitalist command over the movements of migrant women and men is driven above all by the aspiration to close off any space of opposition to the institutional racism that continues to fragment and create hierarchies among different living and working conditions, shifting onto migrants the most extreme outcomes of the general intensification of the compulsion to an ever poorer and more precarious labour that the politics of sacrifice demands everyone to submit to. The world of past and future security decrees and of the flows decrees – with their intention to reduce migrant women and men to unwanted guests, to be chained for as long as required by the shifting demands of production and social reproduction, without any guarantee that they may improve their conditions – is the same world of exploitation, oppression, patriarchy and racism that the government seeks to reinforce through the budget bill, and which finds in war an inexhaustible source of legitimacy. This is why the struggles of migrant women and men, their movements and their opposition to the racist wage regime are an indispensable component to organise a collective refusal of war and of the world that war sustains.
