The lessons Labour can learn from Italy’s migration policies are simple: they are harmful, short-sighted, and ineffective

Post by Diana Volpe. Diana is a DPhil Candidate in International Development and Managing Editor at Border Criminologies. Their research focuses on the legitimation processes of migration policies in Italy with particular focus on the Italy-Libya cooperation agreements. 

Weeks after scrapping the Rwanda plan, the UK Labour government met Italy’s far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni to express admiration for its migration policies’ apparent successes. They announced close partnerships in taking down the “gangs that are running this vile trade”, with continued emphasis on international trafficking gangs, “heinous traffickers with long tentacles”, Meloni said.

Since taking office in 2022, the Meloni government has famously pledged to hunt down traffickers across the globe. Domestically, this included new security decrees to slow down disembarkation and search and rescue in the Mediterranean (see Border Criminologies’ statement on it here), and harsher fines for boat drivers with up to 30 years in prison. Internationally, this meant more bilateral agreements with individual countries to block departures, and a deal with Albania to host centres where asylum claims are to be processed offshore.

The UK Government seems inspired by the current Italian administration, praising an apparent reduction in arrivals in Italy of about 60% this year, citing Frontex numbers. It is important to remember, however, how this reduction in 2014 was in contrast to a previous year of unusually high numbers since 2016, even in the context of the central Mediterranean route.

This is not the first time the recent UK governments attempt to follow Italy’s approach to bilateral negotiations with countries ‘upstream’, most recently announcing a scheme to pay £1 million to Libya to help fund the voluntary returns to countries of origin. On top of this, several bilateral initiatives with countries such as Belgium, Bulgaria and Serbia, and return agreements with countries such as Albania, Georgia, India and Pakistan are already in place to deport and return nationals back to their home countries.

Deals between individual countries and Libya in an effort to ‘reduce irregular immigration’ or ‘drive down numbers’ are not new. Italy, with support from the EU Trust Fund for Africa, allocated more than 42 million euros for “integrated border and migration management in Libya” in 2017, the year Italy signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the now defunct Government of National Accord. This included funding, training and aiding in the creation of a nominally autonomous Libyan Coast Guard and Search and Rescue zone. The detention centres and actions of this coast guard have been at the centre of criticism, with reports denouncing the long list of human rights violations happening in Italian-supported detention centres and at sea. For this reason, and in the aftermath of the Hirsi case, which upheld individuals’ right to not be returned, Italy has spent the last decade focusing on policies that would break any jurisdictional links between Italy’s obligations and human rights violations under Libya’s coast guard. What Labour can learn from this form of outsourcing and offshore processing is that it is harmful, short-sighted and deeply implicating in human rights abuses, no matter how hard bilateral agreements might try to keep it out of public sight.

With the deal just becoming operational, with the first boat towards Albania leaving at the start of this week, it is unclear how detention centres set up in Albania will compare to the Libya-run ones, but human rights concerns remain. When questioned about these concerns in the press release, Meloni took offense with the query, describing any allegations of human rights violations as “completely groundless” under Italian jurisdiction, because Italy would not violate human rights.

Nonetheless, what is clear through the words of both PMs at their news conference on the 16th of September, is the permanence of the anti-trafficking narrative. The war on smuggling, most recently arising in the form of ever stronger criminalisation towards people seeking asylum, turns into a war on migration itself. The new old approach continues to paint smuggling as a wide reaching, long-tentacled, dangerous and highly organised crime network, in spite of all research pointing to the contrary.

Just a few weeks ago, the Home Secretary announced its plans to reopen Haslar and Campsfield House IRCs as part of their plans to increase deportation numbers. Shortly after getting into government, Starmer shows interest in offshore processing, and boasts about operating “the single biggest [deportation] flight that has ever taken off carrying people to their countries of origin”. This is despite being so vocal against the UK’s Rwanda scheme, acutely showing succeeding governments’ inability to imagine any alternative in handling mobility. Instead, they continue to re-package and repropose the same policies and narratives under different names.

The consistent denial of evidence-based policy is clear on all migration-related matters, from the Brook House Inquiry Recommendations, to the Home Office pilot for Alternatives to Detention, to the expanding volume of research pointing out the nature of most smuggling networks as loose, small scale, and highly informal. It shows how the political goals underlying migration control policies continue to be purely aimed at electoral wins, rather than informed by policy research.

The security-driven discourse is famously effective because it drives migration away from the realm of politics, but it remains a conscious political choice. Security is so embedded in our understanding of border making that following security-based approaches becomes framed as a moral choice. Yvette Cooper, British Home Secretary, told the BBC: “I don’t think it’s immoral to go after the criminal gangs … quite the opposite. I think it's actually a moral imperative to make sure that we are pursuing the criminal gangs who are putting lives at risk”. We must stay vigilant of these attempts to disguise border control as a form of caring for its victims. It results in proposals for further militarisation as the solution to a problem border militarisation caused. The policies Starmer looks to adopt and that Italy championed have done little to curb the Central Mediterranean Route as the deadliest in the world – with recent deaths in the channel only highlighting further that making these journeys dangerous is a political choice.

It is hard to respond to government policy announcements without feeling like everything there is to say has not already been said and written. But so long as harmful and deadly policies continue to be reproposed in the name of security and humanity, it remains imperative to continue doing so.

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