Tampere And Legal Migration Channels: The Case Of Italy

In the last decades, the unequal distribution of mobility rights has become a major concern for both scholars and policymakers. Indeed, the world experienced a strong increase of free movement rights while, on average, barriers were being reduced (Haas et al., 2014). However, research highlighted that the expansion of eased mobility is limited to citizens of the “richer” areas of the world, whereas the rest faces an increase of restrictions to movement. Steffen Mau (2010) efficiently described this trend, which affects especially African countries, as the “global mobility divide”. In this scenario, the EU actively promoted the creation of new legal migration channels towards countries of migration origin and transit. In 1999, after the Treaty of Amsterdam introduced the supranational competency over migration and asylum, the Council of Tampere defined the pillars and future direction of the European migration policy. The creation of legal migration opportunities, together with the contrast of undocumented migration, was to be achieved by directly including third countries in the European migration strategy. However, after describing the Italian policy framework since Tampere, this report suggests that restrictions not only increased, but that, today, it is virtually impossible to legally migrate towards Italy. In fact, Italian migration policies support the assumption that Member States refrained from adopting new migration channels and, instead, embraced a securitised and restrictive approach.