Saga of Salvini vs. sanctuary cities
PALERMO, SICILY— Italy’s populist interior minister, Matteo Salvini, celebrated parliament’s passage of his security decree to crack down on illegal immigration by assuring his supporters last year that “I won’t stop!”
But stopping Salvini is exactly what Leoluca Orlando, the mayor of Palermo, the Sicilian capital, wants to do.
Passed with much fanfare late last year, Salvini’s security decree was intended to make Italy more unwelcoming to migrants, not least by doing away with two years of “humanitarian protection” for asylum-seekers, a status that allowed them to live in the country legally.
Far from adding to security, said Orlando, 71, a constitutional professor who came to prominence in the fight against the Mafia, the law risks pushing migrants into the shadows and the criminal underworld by denying them legal status as well as access to health care and other social services.
He has refused to apply the decree in a stand that has become a prominent part of a widening grassroots resistance to Salvini’s hard line on immigration, which is increasingly dividing the country even as it has tightened the populist government’s hold on power.
On Feb. 1, in defiance of the law, Orlando pushed through the first four applications by migrants seeking residency under their humanitarian status.
By signing their applications, Orlando hopes to invite a legal challenge by the government that he can take all the way to Italy’s highest court. He intends to argue that Salvini’s measures are unconstitutional and violate the migrants’ human rights.
“I cannot accept that you produce criminality,” Orlando said in an interview in his grand office, surrounded by gilded Islamic manuscripts, a letter from Pope Francis and a paperweight of the Dalai Lama.
Many liberal mayors across the country, from Naples to Florence to Milan, applauded Orlando’s intention to defy the government, which he first announced at the end of December.
Orlando’s office now hopes his action will clear the way for the mayors to create Italian versions of the sanctuary cities that sprouted in the United States in opposition to President Donald Trump’s similarly minded crackdown on immigration.
In late January, week, Tuscany, Umbria, Sardinia and the northern region of Piedmont filed a legal complaint against the security decree, charging that it actually increased criminal activity and decreased the possibility of economic integration.
In a further knock on the government, prosecutors in Sicily initiated an investigation of Salvini on charges of “kidnapping,” after his refusal to allow an Italian coast guard ship carrying migrants to dock this summer.
In the absence of plausible political opposition at the national level, some have welcomed the signs of resistance against the government, led by Salvini’s anti-immigrant league and the anti-establishment Five Star Movement.
“There are many little outbreaks that have failed to form in a single flame,” said Claudio Cerasa, the author of a manual on resistance to Italy’s culture of intolerance and the editor of Il Foglio, a newspaper critical of the government.
But the flickers of resistance have only inflamed Salvini, who clearly thinks he has a winning position ahead of critical European Parliament elections in May. He continues to find ever more inventive ways to ratchet up his crack down on illegal migration.
Salvini has embraced the investigation aimed at him as a chance to play the victim of overreaching magistrates. He has already attacked the civilly disobedient mayors as scofflaws who “help the illegal migrants hate Italians, and they will answer to the law and to history.” “I will not stop,” he pledged. Indeed, last month, Salvini refused to offer a safe port to the Sea Watch 3, a vessel that had rescued 47 migrants from the Mediterranean Sea. For nearly two weeks, the ship was adrift as Salvini spoke of forming a “naval blockade” to seal off the country.
The standoff ended, only after European neighbours agreed to take in the majority of the migrants, who disembarked in another Sicilian city, Catania.
Orlando accused Salvini of fearmongering and “using the banner of security to get votes in the next European election.”
His decision, which his office said is based on his reading of Italian law, breaks a bureaucratic impasse with city workers who, unlike him, were loath to defy Salvini’s decree. It sets off a process that will likely result this month in the mayor personally granting residency to the applicants.
“This is the first concrete act of opposition,” said Orlando, who is eager for Italy’s highest court to rule on Salvini’s law. “I need a court!”
At the University of Palermo, a group of 10 lawyers and law students offered free counsel to migrants thrown in disarray by the new decree. Outside a classroom, lawyers worked off a call list with the names Sakko, Konate, Camara and Bolul. Migrants who arrived in Italy as minors — attending Italian schools, learn- ing the language and integrating in their cities — often counted on the humanitarian status to remain in Italy when they came of age. Instead, many risked suddenly becoming illegal as they turned 18.
Alieu Sosseh, 17, said his application for a residency permit had been postponed until later this month.
“I don’t know why. I’m not trying to do something bad in this country. I have been going to school,” he said, worried that people in his situation will eventually be forced to start dealing drugs.
“In life when you can’t get your meals — your breakfast — and that is the only opportunity, you can get involved in that thing,” he said. “You won’t like it, but you have no choice.”
Salvini’s critics say that is exactly the outcome he desires. By producing more migrant crime, they say, he produces more anxiety and fear, exactly the conditions on which his law-and-order proposals feed. But Salvini said the mayors and other liberals are simply making excuses for migrants, who they prefer over law-abiding Italian citizens.
Acting on the authority of Salvini’s security decree, the police last month cleared out an integration centre in Castelnuovo di Porto, north of Rome. Salvini said the closure of such centres, where about 6,000 refugee applicants across the country receive shelter, would save the state about 6 million euros.