Going through Dante’s Purgatory:
Asylum seekers in Italian bureaucracy

León Salvador, Eréndira

Going through Dante’s Purgatory: Asylum seekers in Italian bureaucracy

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Citation

León Salvador, E. Going through Dante’s Purgatory: Asylum seekers in Italian bureaucracy. 2020. handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10230/47058

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Abstract

Italy has become a key actor in the global debate regarding immigration policies. Asylum seekers arriving in Italian territory face a legal limbo that is similar to Dante’s description of Purgatory. The country’s asylum regulations and procedures have rendered applicants’ lives precarious and vulnerable due to the absence of an organic legal instrument that can effectively protect them, the juxtaposition of the different level of governance, the lack of social communication between the locals with asylum seekers, institutional inefficiency, bureaucratic practice and the instrumental use of constructed narratives by politicians. This dissertation examines from a sociological perspective how the bureaucratic asylum request process in Italy has changed from 2008 to 2019 and how its changes are related to political transformations in the Italian government. My analysis reveals a system in which political actors have a primary role in criminalising immigration and, helped by the increasing media attention towards asylum seekers, creates a social aversion to immigration. Empirical evidence shows that this is not just driven by the anti-immigrant right, but that leftist parties have also played a key role in rendering more precarious asylum seekers’ lives. In conclusion, Italy has to stop instrumentalizing immigration to serve political interests, and the Italian society needs to engage in a politicisation of asylum through bottom-up social strategies of political action to achieve social cohesion, providing elaborated responses and exploit Italy’s potential to become a good example in asylum management.