Closing the borders to protect EU member states’ (EUMS) sovereignty and their supposed national homogeneity has become a prevailing political argument conducive to the externalisation of the migration management.
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On the other, the border control argument brought about by European leaders assumes defence of state frontiers as the main goal to be achieved, irrespective of individual needs. On the one hand, the duty to protect people on the move puts the humanitarian dimension at the centre of the crisis management. Migration and border control have then become a highly politicised issue both at European and national level entrapping the European Union (EU) in contradictory political strategies. The year 2015 is often labelled as the year of the Mediterranean migration crisis, with the Central Mediterranean route heavily weighting the humanitarian crisis in terms of victims. We show that the ambiguous position of the centre-left government in the management of immigration in Italy between 20 tipped the balance of the competition in the migration battleground, ultimately giving a crucial advantage to anti-refugee actors in the promotion of hegemonic frames. Based on new empirical data from over 30 face-to-face interviews with activists, the article shows that, while discursive opportunities trigger conflicting interpretations of the same themes, competition between the anti-refugee and solidarity camp is asymmetric, both with regard to the definition of the issue and to the identification of political opponents. To address this gap, we look at movement-countermovement dynamics in the field of migration between 20, to understand how contrasting actors frame causes and solutions for the problems at stake. While the so-called «refugee crisis» paved the way to multiple forms of action in support and against the arrival of migrants and asylum seekers, traditional social movement approaches fall short in explaining the dynamics between opposing camps, as scholars tended to focus on individual movements as isolated actors. This article analyses how contrasting movements compete over the issue of migration in Italy and points out a significant role of the state in shaping this competition. These results constitute a first systematic insight into a policy domain still to be explored and provide a definition of an analytical model aiming to look at similar policy-making processes in other fields and/or in other case-based and comparative studies. Particular emphasis was placed on bottom-up dynamics and on the contribution of non institutional actors. This made it possible to assess the way in which each actor (EU and national institutions, local governments, NGOs, etc.) moved within and across the governance levels, influenced and limited by institutional constraints and what their influence on the policy process was. Through a dialogue between different disciplines and analytical approaches, the analysis focused on three different governance levels, moving from Sicily to Italy to the EU level, and considering the way in which anti-smuggling policies were elaborated and implemented.
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This research sought to understand the policy-making dynamics in response to migrant smuggling within the European Union, focusing in particular on the Italian and Sicilian case over the period 2014-2019.