Abstract
In 2011, to manage the exceptional flow of people escaping North Africa, the Italian government released the North Africa Emergency (Emergenza Nord Africa, ENA) provision, temporarily relaxing migration policies for some categories of asylum seekers. Using data from an important charity, we perform baseline difference-in-differences regressions to investigate the impact of this emergency rule on the probability of migrants regularizing their legal status. We exploit the timing of the enactment of the ENA accessibility criteria—such that potential beneficiaries learned of its existence only after the realization of the state of entitlement—to identify the effects of the emergency policy provision on treated and control groups of immigrants. The results show an increased number of successful applications in favor of eligible individuals, although a dramatic boost in the denial rate for other migrants is also observed. This suggests either that some migrants suffered displacement due to the emergency rule, and/or that improper submissions of ENA-oriented applications have occurred. We extend our analysis to the use of multilevel models to shed light on these possible (non-mutually excludable) explanations. Results seem to support the presence of some rule-displacement effects, although the existence of a set of wrongful submissions cannot be excluded. We discuss these possibilities from a policy perspective.
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Recent and current flows of people from North Africa and Syria are reshaping political relationships among EU Member States, especially in the case of the relocation of 160,000 asylum seekers from Italy and Greece, which was recently addressed by the European Commission to assist these two countries in dealing with the pressures of the refugee arrivals (see Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the European Council and the Council, Fourth report on relocation and resettlement, June 15, 2016). The migration crisis has also impacted the relationships of the EU with third-party countries (particularly with Turkey, cf. the so-called EU-Turkey statement of March 18, 2016, aimed at ending the irregular migration from Turkey to the EU in the face of the Syrian refugee crisis). One may also speculate about the role of the ongoing refugee and migrant crisis in determining the result of the referendum on June 23, 2016 in which British citizens voted to exit the European Union (the so-called Brexit). Finally, the current (summer 2017) rapid and enormous migration phenomenon across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy calls for urgent reflections on both national and international migration policies.
The main legislative source for Italian migration regulation is the “Consolidated Act on Immigration Laws”, Legislative Decree (D.lgs.) No. 286/1998, which was enacted in 1998 but has been significantly updated over time. It is worth noting that whereas the refugee system is regulated according to international law on refugees and asylum seekers (implemented in Italy by Law No. 722/1954 and D.lgs. No. 251/2007), the ordinary system is based only on national laws.
At the start of our research, the residence permit for the beneficiaries of subsidiary protection status was originally valid for 3 years; later, Legislative Decree (D.lgs.) No. 18/2014 increased the validity of this type of residence permit from three to 5 years (i.e., the same duration established for residence permits issued to the beneficiaries of refugee status).
The regulatory framework for the granting of work residence permits differs among foreign citizens who legally reside in Italy and those who wish to enter the country. The latter are admitted according to a system based on quotas, which set the maximum number of third-country nationals that can enter Italy (specific exceptions are provided for high-skilled workers). Entry quotas are annually established with a decree of the President of the Council of Ministers and are aimed at organizing the hiring of foreign workers (distinct decrees are usually enacted for seasonal and non-seasonal workers). The employer shall at first submit an authorization request to the competent Immigration Desk; the eligibility of each request is then verified considering the quotas. Work residence permits have a maximum duration of 1 year (for temporary work) or 2 years (for permanent workers) and are renewable.
In the first 9 months of 2011, more than 60,000 migrants fled to Italy (cf. Decree of the President of the Council of Ministers, October 6, 2011).
According to Art. 20, D.lgs. No. 286/1998, temporary measures of protection may be established, by decree of the President of the Council of Ministers, in exceptional circumstances, such as armed conflicts, natural disasters, and other serious situations, in non-EU countries. Prior to the crisis in North Africa, this rule had been applied only once, during the Kosovo conflict in 1999.
According to the Decrees of October 6, 2011 and May 15, 2012, the duration of these temporary residence permits for humanitarian reasons was extended until November 21, 2012 (it must also be noted that ENA temporary protection did not preclude subsequent requests for refugee status). Finally, the decree on February 28, 2013 set rules for the end of the temporary humanitarian protection regime: foreign citizens who had benefited from these measures could apply for either an assisted voluntary return program to their country of origin (or to the original host country) or the conversion of their residence permits for humanitarian reasons into other types of residence permits (e.g., work, study, family, etc.).
The Decree of the President of the Council of Ministers, August 3, 2011, explicitly recognized that the Horn of Africa was suffering the worst humanitarian crisis in 60 years (see also Crisis in the Horn of Africa, at FAO http://www.fao.org/emergencies/crisis/horn-of-africa/en/).
In fact, applicants for asylum can legally stay in the country until their case is definitely decided.
For example, according to the Decree of April 5, 2011, foreign citizens who had fled to Italy in the relevant period and had already obtained, requested, or been refused another type of residence permit could apply for the ENA temporary protection. It is possible that the special protection was also requested by (and then denied to) migrants who were not entitled to it because they were already in the country on January 1, 2011.
In most cases, African migrants arrive in Italy by boat. They often face shipwrecks, with the consequent loss of documents and belongings. For these reasons, public authorities may find it difficult to verify an individual’s true nationality/time of arrival.
The explicit use of quotas aimed at dealing with requests for international or humanitarian protection in some sense would represent a breach of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (CRSR, also known as the Geneva Convention, 1951) and European Directives. This kind of restriction is used by the Italian government in the case of migrant workers, with quotas annually established by Decree of the President of the Council of Ministers (cf. Art. 3, par. 4, D.lgs. No. 286/1998).
The nationality was known for migrants who sought advice regarding their own residence permit, but not known when Italian citizens sought legal advice for non-Italian relatives, friends, and neighbors. In these cases (3.8% of the sample of individuals requiring advice on residence permits), we do not have information regarding the nationality of the immigrants for whom legal advice is required. We classified them in the category “other countries” in Table 1.
This corresponds to a negative selection of immigrants compared with the entirety of migrants entering Italian borders. Nevertheless, this type of selection should not significantly bias our empirical results, to the extent that the control and treatment groups are both negatively selected.
Eurostat does not provide information on the number of applications for all types of permits. The number of applications submitted, as well as the number of positive outcomes (from which one can compute the success rate) is available only for asylum applications.
The increase in the number of applications from African countries (Table 7) is evident from 2010 to 2011, while the increase in the number of decisions concerning these countries is observed throughout 2011 and 2012 (Table 8). This 1-year-lag reflects the average time elapsing between the moment of application and the subsequent decision (cf. ISTAT Report 2015–2016, Permessi di soggiorno per asilo politico e protezione umanitaria, p. 3, fn. 3).
Aggregate data do not show such a decrease in the success rate of asylum seekers not entitled to ENA benefits (cf. Table 9). However, this could be suggestive of the fact that those immigrants applying for a permit for reasons different from the humanitarian ones (e.g., permits for work, for family reunion, etc.) may have been those suffering displacement.
Information about the years of schooling is available only for a sub-set of immigrants in our database. Consequently, in Sects. 4.1 and 4.2 we perform the econometric analysis by relying on a missing at random (MAR) assumption. Multiple imputation techniques have then been used to replace non-available observations (see, for example, Little and Rubin 2014).
We consider the intention to treat (ITT) because ENA-eligible migrants could apply either for asylum or for other ordinary types of permits. We have information on ex ante intended demands for categories of permits (renewal, family, emergency) and/or the kind of application suggested by the operators of CdC. Although no details on the type of application actually demanded from public authorities are available, we have precise information regarding the outcome of the application (success vs. denial).
We also performed estimations where the treated group included only citizens of North African countries (i.e., excluding those coming from the Horn of Africa and from Sub-Saharan Africa). We did not obtain substantially different results.
Further comments about the composition of the control group are provided in Sect. 4.2.
The enactment date was April 5, whereas the relevant time of arrival in Italy for eligibility purposes was January 1–April 5, 2011. In particular, the decree explicitly stated that the temporary residence permit for humanitarian reasons could not be granted to citizens of North African countries who arrived in Italy before or after the relevant period.
Full estimation output (including fixed effects) is available upon request.
We do not have panel data. However, applications occurred at different points in time. Hence, the repeated state of emergency involving African countries other than the ENA ones may cause correlation between immeasurable features of the success rate of applicants, even if they came from different places.
While considering the origin we also distinguish among immigrants from North Africa being entitled to the ENA provision and non-entitled immigrants.
It is worth mentioning that our dataset includes nine migrants from the Indian subcontinent that applied for the ENA protection, as they were likely to be foreign workers who had fled the Libyan civil war. This anecdotal evidence is in line with the situation acknowledged by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers on October 30, 2012, whereby most of the applications for international protection made by heterogeneous groups of migrants fleeing Libya had initially been rejected.
Among 404 renewals in our dataset, only 8 were for working reasons, and none was for family reunification.
New offices were not organized, neither were new personnel hired. Incumbent offices and personnel were instructed as mentioned above (see, Sect. 2): i) the ENA implied a simplified procedure for temporary residence permit applications and the State Police were required to release ENA permits by implementing this specific urgent procedure; ii) in an official document (October 30, 2012), the Italian government also acknowledged the problem regarding citizens of other countries (Sub-Saharan Africa, Bangladesh etc.) who had worked in Libya for many years and had left the country during the civil war.
See, for instance, the Document released by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers on October 30, 2012 (supra, Sect. 2). This document, addressed to the territorial authorities that faced the emergency, recognized that the increase in the number of asylum seekers could generate a “potentially explosive situation” and also protract the time needed to complete application procedures for all residence permits.
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We would like to thank two anonymous referees, Laura De Carlo, Beppe Monetti, Marian Moszoro, Marcella Nicolini, and the participants in the Conference of Empirical Legal Studies–Europe at the University of Amsterdam on June 21–22, 2016, and the annual conference of the Italian Economic Association at the University “Parthenope” of Naples, on December 22–24, 2015. We are grateful to Arianna Cozzi for her excellent research assistance and to Casa della Carità and its operators for their cooperation. We acknowledge financial support for this research from Centro Baffi, Bocconi University.
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dalla Pellegrina, L., Saraceno, M. & Suardi, M. Migration policy: did an emergency provision displace standard rules? Evidence from Italy. Econ Polit 35, 863–893 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40888-018-0128-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40888-018-0128-0