Italy at the Border of Humanitarian and Political Responsibility in the Crisis Migration

Since 2011, Italy faces an increasing of the refugees arrival and since the management of thousands of people reaching Italian (and European at large) coasts spread over each month, by becoming an urgent political issue to handle. This is certainly the biggest refugees crisis since World War Two (UNHCR, 2015) and a multilevel approach rose to react urgently: Italian institutions are called to regulate migration via administrative and labour techniques, while civil society and NGOs remain the main actors to handle this crisis, which is humanitarian as a matter of fact.

On one hand, the rising of neo-nationalism in numerous European countries explains limits of taking a common management system of refugees´ inclusion into the labour market. Foreign policy is led by single national European country, and cases of occasionally “closing borders” between Austria-Italy, France-Italy and Hungary-Austria has appeared in the last two years. On the other hand, crossing the Mediterranean sea keeps being the heading (but the most dangerous) way to reach Europe, while international and Italian associations are the main actors to provide assistance, at the first stage, and attempt to insert effective skilled refugees into the labour market afterwards.

To this extend, my contribution sheds light on how different approaches are engaged in including skilled refugees into the labour market, by comparing two cases applied in Central Italy, in Emilia Romagna region and in the North, within the Autonomous Province of Trento. In the former, “VESTA” project is an innovative, scaled and decentralized approach, led by a private social cooperative, which is engaged on the recognition of refugees´human and cultural capital into the labour market. While, in the latter, the Public Labour Agency takes centralized directions to insert skilled refugees through labour voucher and training into its own local market.