Mainstream Humanitarian Organizations Politicizing the Increasingly Restrictive Border Management System

Humanitarian third sector organizations (TSOs), regardless of their involvement in the institutional migration control system, were able to cooperate and intervene to defend migrant rights and to counterbalance the restrictive turns identified in this study. These organizations used their position on the ground to (a) concretely supporting migrants, (b) finding solutions for those excluded from reception centers and (c) collecting information useful for different types of advocacy strategies (e.g. outsider, insider, sector coordination). By ensuring potential asylum seekers’ rights and by providing support precisely to those migrants irregularized and excluded from the Italian reception system, TSOs challenged the status quo based on the deterioration and violation of migrant rights. While these rights-based strategies did not promote a radical change and remained within the preexisting legal framework, they did nonetheless contribute to contest the increasingly restrictive climate. Thus, the political dimension of the TSOs’ interventions described below is mainly related to their role of bulwark against the violation of migrants’ rights and the increasingly restrictive policies. During the two restrictive turns identified in this study, the humanitarian TSOs’ political borderwork contributed to an incremental rather than radical change of the status quo in the current border management.