Setting the Stage of Contemporary Migration in the Italian Hostile Environment

This chapter argues for an understanding of the hostile asylum environment constructed in Italy in recent decades that registers how it is rooted in the material context of the nation’s culture and history. Official narratives, populist rhetoric, legal norms, media discourse, and stereotyped interpretations have produced diverse local applications of hostile environment. As a result, the Italian hostile environment cannot be understood as a consistent set of practices but more as fragmented fabrications and unsystematic concrete procedures developed according to diverse regional and local contexts. This specific environment has also formed in response to Europe and to the European Union’s agreements with member countries, and shows the difficulties as well as the achievements that this relationship entails. This chapter is structured around three main analytical clusters: how specific the construction of a hostile environment is in relation to the culture and history of the nation and in relation to the main lines of recent immigration to Italy (whose transit is mostly from Northern Africa and Eastern Europe); how Lampedusa shapes the discursive and symbolic construction of Mediterranean crossing and is also used as a stage in migrant storytelling; and how forms of storytelling, and in particular plays, have helped to forge a narrative that problematises and contests the national hostile environment.