Further to the bottom of the hierarchy: the stratification of forced migrants’ welfare rights amid the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy

This article analyzes how forced migrants have been pushed further down in the hierarchy of social citizenship amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on case study research on six cities in north- 10 eastern Italy, we show that their welfare rights have stratified due to national immigration policies that imply unequal access to social protection. Local-level forces – including regional welfare institutions, municipal governments, and civil society organizations –have either magnified or mitigated such state-driven stratification. 15 This resulted in uneven landscapes of social citizenship, with a minority of migrants relatively well-protected and the others entangled into downward, COVID-induced spirals of marginalization, by which various forms of exclusion have activated, and accumulated on, one another. These findings travel beyond Italy 20 as an exemplary case of rampant nativism and urge post-pandemic host societies to emancipate welfare rights from the immigration policies to which they are so often subordinated.