Public Policies and Community Services for Immigrant Integration: Italy and the European Union

The starting point of this work was a review of legislation and proposals of legislationof the European Commission, Directorate ‘Justice and Home Affairs’ and ‘Employmentand Social Affairs’, on employment and integration policy. This research activityallowed us to acquire a satisfying legislative framework on EC programmes of socialinclusion adopted before and after the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997).In particular, article 13 of this Treaty and the subsequent directives gave a strongimpetus to the fight against discrimination, the adoption of race equality policy, therecognition of fundamental rights and thus the issue of social inclusion in its widerscope. Moving from these few considerations and recent EC proposals of legislation(CEC, 2003a) linking employment strategies with integration policies for third countrynationals, our research focused on the measures for immigrant integration in hostsocieties.Building upon the acquired research experience in migration and its policy managementat EU ‘old’ and ‘new’ Member States level, we opted for a comparative method ofanalysis implying two levels of governance: national and supranational. Moreover, thefundamental importance of social dialogue, expressed not only in the 1993 ‘GreenPaper’ on European social policy but strongly reaffirmed in recent EC Communicationssuch as ‘On a Community Immigration Policy’ (CEC, 2000) and ‘On an Open Methodof Coordination for the Community Immigration Policy’ (CEC, 2001b), urged us tolook carefully at the role of NGOs and migrants’ associations in combating socialexclusion. This paper carefully reviews the immigrant integration practicesimplemented by public and private actors in Italy. The overview of the Italian caseallows us to identify critical points, but also to observe how a quite recent nationalexperience in managing migration makes it possible to outline comparable explanatorymodels.Finally, notwithstanding the similarities between countries, the lack of a single modelfor implementing integration policies emphasizes the peculiarities of geographicalcontexts and different migratory experiences, such that it is necessary to call for somecommon standards. The second part of this paper, ‘Immigration, integration andemployment: the current EU state of play’, focuses on legislative proposals and ECtrends in the harmonisation of integration policies. A number of conclusiverecommendations aim to match the Italian and EU countries’ experience.