Immigrant integration policy frames in Italy. A multilevel governance perspective

Immigrant integration in Italy has been explicitly addressed in public debates only in the first half of of the 2000s, following a number of dramatic focus events such as 9/11, the bombings in Madrid (March 2004) and London (July 2005), the murder of Theo Van Gogh filmmaker in Amsterdam (November 2004), and the Danish cartoon crisis (September 2005). As a recent immigration country in the European context, flows started slowly in the 1970s to gain momentum in the second half of the following decade. Borders’ controls and mass arrivals of undocumented migrants have always monopolised both the media and the political debate. For a long time, immigrant integration has not been issued at all: immigrants were welcomed insofar as they were able to access the labour market, also informally, consistently with a conception of immigration based on considerations of utility for the Italian economy. This paper intends to address changes in the framing of immigrant integration in Italy through a multilevel governance perspective. The goal is that of understanding what kind of different policy frames of integration have been emerging at a regional level in Italy and if developments in national legislation and public debates in the mid 2000s have triggered a changing in the policies pursued by these levels of government, considered that, after the federalist reform of 2001, the regions have being enjoying complete autonomy in the field of social policy, immigrant integration included. To this end, in this paper we investigate policy frames in two politically opposed regions, namely Veneto, governed since 2000 by a centre-right majority, including the openly anti-immigrant Northern League party (Lega Nord); and Emilia-Romagna, governed over the same period by a centre-left majority, encompassing the ex-Communist party and leftwing Catholics.