Giuseppe Campesi’s research while affiliated with University of Bari Aldo Moro and other places

The aim of this article is to describe the evolution of immigration detention policies at the Southern European border. This will be done by presenting original data on the actual functioning of immigration detention in Italy in the wake of the so-called “refugee crisis”. By shedding light on these developments, the article reveals a notable convergence of first reception and return policies, which in turn is driving a transformation of the landscape of immigration detention leading to a proliferation of detention regimes and spaces of containment. Drawing on the literature on carceral geographies, this development is analyzed within the framework of Italy's distinct role in the geopolitics of EU border control policies. The article ultimately suggests that the immigration detention system has gradually been co-opted by the border control infrastructure, becoming part of a broader and intricate control assemblage whose essential function is the regulation of human mobility.

The aim of this article is to explore the peculiarity of Italian policies on immigration detention and their evolution over time. This will be done by highlighting the main factors that might explain the apparent political disinvestment in immigration detention in Italy, in particular in the years between 2013 and 2015, and account for the turnaround in approach announced and then implemented by the two Interior Ministers in charge between 2017 and 2019. The article uses the Italian case as an opportunity to explore the functions that are assigned to immigration detention in destination countries. In particular, it considers whether or not it can be argued that immigration detention in Italy has been “reinvented” (meaning that its functions have somewhat changed) as a consequence of the so-called “refugee crisis” and in light of Italy’s specific position in the contemporary geopolitics of the EU’s border control regime.

The aim of this article is to explore the ambiguous legal status of immigration detention by discussing the main theoretical perspectives on its nature and the functions it plays in contemporary migration policies. After presenting a typological and genealogical reconstruction of immigration detention, the article contends that it should not be seen as being related either to the politics of ‘exception’ or to the expanding reach of ‘penal’ power in a context of mass migration. Instead, the argument presented here is that immigration detention exhibits the characteristics of preventive measures typically related to the exercise of police powers and that its increased role in migration policies should be read in the wider framework of the shifting boundaries between the ‘penal’ and the ‘preventive’ state in contemporary societies.

Drawing on an empirical study, this article explores the role of immigration detention in Italy by analysing the way a specific rhetoric of ‘dangerousness’ has developed and is being used within the framework of immigration enforcement policies. Our argument is that immigration detention has been transformed into an instrument of crime prevention and ‘social defence’, and that this transformation is fuelled by the central position that the legal categories of ‘risk’ and ‘danger’ have assumed in the regulation of the return procedure. The article contends that immigration law enforcement agencies can make use of immigration detention as a flexible control tool to manage what are perceived as the most problematic populations in urban areas, thus practising a policy of selective enforcement that while not explicitly built along racial and ethnic lines, clearly discriminates among migrants according to their ‘social marginality’ or supposed ‘social dangerousness’.

In this article, I will analyse how the Italian reception system has been transformed after the ‘refugee crisis’, showing how the change cannot be reduced to a mere expansion of the reception capacity. I will do this by tracing a genealogy of the Italian reception system and highlighting its main features before and after the ‘refugee crisis’. My hypothesis is that the ‘refugee crisis’ and the sense of emergency it created has stimulated the emergence of distinct segments within the Italian reception system functioning according to radically different philosophies and objectives. This, in addition to increasing the overall lack of consistency of the system, is having a profound impact on the rights of asylum seekers, greatly increasing the risk of their spatial and social segregation within Italian society.

This article analyses from a socio-legal point of view how the European Union Agenda on Migration is reshaping the Common European Asylum System by focusing on the impact it has had on the reform of the Italian reception system. After a preliminary examination of the European Union standards on reception, this article focuses on the European Union Agenda on Migration and shows that its main aim is to stimulate frontline Member States to reform their border control and reception practices by strengthening powers for the surveillance and detention of asylum-seekers. It then explores the Italian case, analysing how the hotspot approach has been implemented in practice and the influence it is having in pushing the Italian reception system from a policy model driven - albeit with a certain degree of ambiguity - by humanitarian concerns, to a model where security and border control priorities prevail. Finally, it concludes by describing some of the main features of the social sorting apparatus which was created by the European Union Agenda on Migration for discriminating between asylum-seekers in clear need of protection who can be relocated to other Member States, and others who should be trapped in the reception systems of frontline Member States.

The paper proposes that immigration detention has been turned into a quick surrogate of criminal policies that the police may use for the purpose of managing the 'dangerous' populations in the urban space, with the purpose of producing a (more ideal than real) ordered and secure public space. Dangerousness and risk have recently become core concepts in the Italian immigration law with regards to detention and deportation. We found that the police and judges of the Peace abuse the rhetoric of dangerousness and risk in a way that is altering the very nature of immigration detention and its declared functions. Drawing from about 400 removal decrees and detention orders collected in Bari and Bologna, the paper argues that immigration detention in Italy is a dispositif for selecting and containing what we might name as a specific 'dangerous mobility', rather than for removing irregular immigration tout court. We will focus on how a specific 'rhetoric of dangerousness' is constructed and used by the police and judges in decisions to detain migrants.