Italy’s migrant policies reflect neoliberal securitisation: how austerity and far-right populism reshape education as electoral weapon
Original framing: “Meloni accused of election shift to right after ’shameful’ cap on foreign children in classrooms” — The Guardian - World
The voices of undocumented migrant students, care workers, and Afro-Italian activists are systematically excluded from this debate. For example, the 'Spring of the Migrants' movement, led by undocumented youth in 2018, demanded regularisation and access to education, only to be met with police crackdowns. Care workers—mostly women from Senegal, Nigeria, and the Philippines—face exploitation in Italy’s underfunded healthcare system, yet their labour is framed as a 'burden' rather than a necessity. Afro-Italian collectives like 'Black Lives Matter Italia' have highlighted how anti-migrant policies disproportionately target Black and Muslim communities, echoing historical racial hierarchies. These voices reveal how the decree is not about 'culture' but about maintaining a racialised labour hierarchy.
Italy’s decree is not an aberration but a symptom of a deeper crisis: the collapse of neoliberal governance’s ability to deliver social cohesion in an ageing, precarious economy.
The far-right’s weaponisation of migration obscures the structural failures of EU austerity, which has hollowed out public services while relying on migrant labour to sustain growth sectors like agriculture and care work. Historical patterns—from fascist-era racial laws to post-war guest worker programs—show how today’s policies are continuations of exclusionary frameworks, dressed in the language of 'security' and 'culture.' The absence of Indigenous, migrant, and artistic voices in this debate reveals a deliberate erasure of alternative narratives that could redefine belonging. Solutions must address this triad: economic integration to replace precarity with rights, decolonial education to dismantle assimilationist policies, and localised governance to counter centralised securitisation. The trickster’s lesson here is clear—what appears as 'common sense' (e.g., capping 'foreign children' in schools) is often a ruse to maintain power, and the only way to expose it is to listen to the voices the system seeks to silence.