Shelter from the Storm: Virtuous Systems of Urban Asylum Governance Coping with Italy's Immigration Crackdown

Immigration and asylum became tremendously contested in Italy over the last decade. Especially since 2017, left-leaning executives eroded asylum rights for the sake of competing with their right-wing opponents. The climax was then reached in 2018, when Matteo Salvini – leader of the far-right Lega party and newly appointed Minister of the Interior – authored the ‘Security Decree I’ as a spearhead of his anti-immigration platform. These new provisions restricted the access to, and the contents of, interna-tional protection, along with the role of local governments in policymaking. This arti-cle explores the shockwave of this restrictive turn on ‘virtuous’ systems of urban asy-lum governance, as well as their capacity for resistance. Theoretically, the study draws on the multi-level governance approach to migration studies, which is however com-plemented through an enhanced analytical focus on conflictual and horizontal interac-tions. Empirically, we present a case study research on Bologna and Parma. The asy-lum systems of these two cities – consisting of small-scale, high-quality reception cen-ters and based on sustained cooperation between state and non-state actors – were put under heavy pressure. However, only Bologna proved able to (partly) resist the asylum crackdown and maintain the cooperative relations between state and non-state actors. This outcome owes to a set of driving forces at the local level—namely, a left-leaning local government and political sub-culture, a long-standing tradition of progressive welfare policies, and a vast constellation of civil society organizations. We suggest that these findings have significant implications for practitioners wanting to oppose anti-immigration policies locally.