Tackling Immigration and Refugee Crisis in Italy

The aim of this paper is to briefly analyse and introduce the background of irregular immigration and refugee flows in the Mediterranean Sea to Italy and I will also analyse the Italian government’s responses to this challenge. In the last decades Italy has become a destination and transit country for migratory flows. However, the rising migration and refugee waves over recent years on the Central Mediterranean route are not the primary reasons of this, but they have surely contributed to the intensification and the secularisation of this process. As a result of the irregular migration and refugee pressure in the Mediterranean and partly due to the huge media interest in it, the phenomenon of migration has been securitised and the attitude of the essentially inclusive Italian society has changed, and there is a growing number of people who reject this process and has a negative opinion on it. So far the Italian government has dealt with the migration crisis by using both bilateral and European tools. Although the major Italian political parties are deeply divided over the government’s response to tackle the migration crisis, the Italian government has managed to balance between a realist or pragmatic and a Europeanised approach without the securitization of this issue. This paper shows that the Italian government has implemented a Europeanised-realist approach towards the crisis management.