Lampedusa, September 14, 2023. Seven thousand people arrive in less than a day aboard dozens of boats from Tunisia. The emergency is served: an “invasion of clandestine” individuals becomes the perfect stage for the government’s new proposals.

Migrant people are pushed into the background, the crossing of borders to reach Europe becomes a scandalous act rather than a legitimate demand for freedom and individual and social development. These events are instrumentalized to announce increasingly strong proposals in the face of the new global paradigm. The Salvini-Meloni government proposes to tackle migration with a surge of repressive measures: naval blockades, port closures, and tight agreements with authoritarian governments beyond the Mediterranean. But the only practical outcome seems to be the opening of new CPRs (Centers for Repatriation), with one in each Italian region.

 It’s not a new recipe, but a revival of the ethnic detention system established in 1998 with the temporary stay centers by the Turco-Napolitano law and resurrected by governments of every political stripe to stigmatize the migrant condition. These controversial detention facilities have a problematic legal status, marked by suicides and abuses that have led authoritative institutions to declare them inhumane. They hold people made irregular by the Bossi-Fini law on immigration, but also all those deprived of the right to international protection, which the so-called Cutro Decree aims to increase. Over 20 million euros allocated in the short term, with the declared goal of increasing deportations.

 However, the twenty years of administrative detention have made it clear that CPRs do not serve to carry out deportation procedures but rather to create new barriers to access rights and full citizenship, making migrant individuals more vulnerable and exploitable in the formal and informal economy of the country.