‘Turning the crime-migration nexus upside-down. Mafia interests in the management of migrants and asylum seekers’ reception facilities in Italy’

Orsini, Giacomo [UCL] et al.

Within the framework of the increasing securitization of migration, institutional perspectives on the crime-migration nexus concentrate on undocumented migrants and asylum seekers as potential criminals and, thus, as a danger for the host society. Alternatively, the emphasis stays on smuggling and human trafficking networks. As such, over the years national and regional governments of the most affluent countries have designed and implemented a series of security centred policies to better govern migration and ensure safety for the host societies. Yet, as discussed here, a closer look at the management of unauthorized migrants and asylum seekers arriving in Italy, subverts mainstream views on the relation between crime and migration. By concentrating on the national reception system(s), here we show how securitized policies implemented in time of emergency are actually exploited by criminal organizations to expand their activities and diversify their sources of income. In the past years the Italian Antimafia prosecutors have repeatedly confirmed the involvement of the Calabrian mafia ‘ndrangheta in the management of many reception facilities set by national and European institution to deal with migrants and asylum seekers entering Italy unauthorized. By relying on data collected during a long fieldwork in the iconic border island of Lampedusa and Sicily, combined with the analysis of judicial documents and public sources relative to the cases of Crotone – in Calabria - and Rome, here we show how mafia groups succeeded gaining access to the substantial financial resources allocated there by national and European institutions. According to our findings, the infiltration of criminal groups is facilitated when new public funding become available over emergencies. Since authorities rely on exceptional measures and procedures, controls on transparency and due diligence tend to be overruled. This is even more the case when public money comes from geographically and institutionally distant authorities in Brussels.