Governing Immigration from Third Countries: Evolution and Limitations of the Regulatory Framework for the Entry and Stay of Foreign Workers in Italy

This contribution will focus on the ambivalences and contradictions that have characterized national legislation on the entry and residence of foreign workers in Italy. Specifically, this analysis will examine the so-called “Turco-Napolitano” law (Law No. 40/1998 and the related Consolidation Act - Legislative Decree 286/1998), which regulates the immigration of non-EU citizens. Particular attention will be given to key pillars of the law’s initial framework, aimed at ensuring a controlled and lawful policy for entry and residence while promoting an immigration model capable of fostering long-term stabilization. To this end, we will explore how the law sought to integrate employment, family unity and residency to create favourable conditions for migrants to establish roots in the territory. Employment was thus positioned not only as a means to secure legal entry and stay but also as a pathway toward integration into the host society. The second part of this contribution will instead examine how, through amendments to Legislative Decree 286/1998, subsequent regulatory interventions – namely the Bossi-Fini law (Law No. 189/2002) and post-2008 security decrees – have imposed stricter regulations and introduced destabilizing elements affecting the presence of foreign workers in Italy, thereby significantly altering the original framework of migration law. In particular, we will explore how these measures impact the three core pillars of the original law – employment, family unity and residency – by weakening the legal status of migrant workers, resulting in heightened risks of precariousness and instability in living conditions, as well as forms of occupational segregation and exploitation. The inconsistencies of this regulatory tightening – which generates irregularity and mistreatment – will be re-examined in the context of two key historical moments in Italy: the 2008–2009 economic crisis and the refugee crisis that began with the Arab uprisings and escalated in 2015. This analysis aims to show how these two “critical” events were instrumentalized to perpetuate a view of the foreign presence as an “exceptional” circumstance, persistently framed as a temporary situation rather than a structural aspect of a complex society. At the same time, these crises have been used to legitimize increasingly restrictive policies on the rights and legal status of foreign workers, driven by a tension between economic utilitarianism and securitarian approaches in a country whose Constitution is founded on the principles of work as a means of dignity and social emancipation.