The Bossi-Fini Law: Explicit Fanaticism, Implicit Moderation, and Poisoned Fruits

Abstract

On 11 November 2002, the terms of the amnesty promoted by the second Berlusconi government to legalize those foreign workers without residence permits expired. The amnesty, the fifth of its kind in Italy over the last two decades, saw the submission of 702,156 applications. If, as expected, the overwhelming majority of these applications see the concession of residence permits, the overall effect will be greater than that of the sum of the two previous amnesties, promoted respectively by the Lamberto Dini government in 1995 and the Romano Prodi government in 1998. Both the existence and the success of this amnesty may appear paradoxical: it was promoted by a coalition that had previously carried out a long and exhausting election campaign focused on (among other things) the repeated accusation that the government was too tolerant toward illegal immigration, and was capable only of correcting irregular situations rather than eliminating them. In the first few months of the second Berlusconi government, moreover , the center-right politicians had announced a great number of often conflicting proposals, designed to solve the problem of illegal immigration in an exclusively repressive manner. After less than one year, a new amnesty has just expired, and the law discussed and passed by the Italian Parliament (the so-called Bossi-Fini law), despite