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IMMIGRATION

Italy angered by Swiss stance on Italian workers

The Swiss ambassador to Rome has been hauled in front of Italy’s foreign affairs minister to explain Switzerland’s frosty stance towards Italian nationals working over the border, Swiss and Italian media reported on Tuesday.

Published: 29 July 2015 10:07 CEST

Italy angered by Swiss stance on Italian workers

Ticino's measures apply to foreigners working in the canton.

Since April the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino, which borders Italy, has requested that Italian nationals working in the region reveal their criminal record status to Swiss authorities.

The measure applies to Italians – and indeed all EU citizens – seeking a B permit to live and work in Ticino as well as those living in Italy but working over the border.

In a note to Swiss ambassador Giancarlo Kessler, Italy’s foreign office secretary general Michele Valensise denounced Ticino’s stance, reported Swiss news agency ATS.

In a statement reported by Ticino newspaper Corriere del Ticino, Valensise said the measure was “in violation of the 1999 European agreement on the free movement of people, blatantly discriminates against Italian citizens and contrasts with the excellent state of bilateral relations” between the countries.

The minister asked that Bern look to end the situation which has sparked “deep dissatisfaction in Italy.”

According to the Italians, ambassador Kessler agreed that Switzerland considered Ticino’s stance incompatible with Swiss-Italian accords.

Back in June the Swiss migration secretariat (SEM) judged the canton’s action to be illegal.

Swiss President Simonetta Sommaruga expressed her own dissatisfaction with Ticino’s action on a visit to the canton in July, saying that it must “respect international agreements”.

The issue highlights Switzerland’s bottom-up system of governance which gives individual cantons within the confederation considerable power to set their own rules.

It also treads on a delicate issue for the Swiss federal government, which is still considering how to deal with the outcome of a February 2014 referendum in which an anti-immigration proposal by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party to limit the number of foreigners working in Switzerland was narrowly passed by the Swiss people.

The result surprised many, including the ruling Social Democrat Party, and led to hostile relations between Switzerland and the EU, which saw the Swiss decision as a contravention of bilateral agreements regarding the free movement of people between the EU and Switzerland.

Ticino approved the initiative with the highest percentage of yes votes of any Swiss canton.

The federal government has until 2017 to decide how to implement immigration limits.

Around 80,000 foreigners arrive to live and work in Switzerland each year and almost a quarter of the country’s eight million inhabitants are foreign nationals.

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With the German far right coming out on top in two state elections earlier this month, the socialist-led national Berlin government has reimposed border controls on Western frontiers that are supposed to see freedom of movement in the European Union’s Schengen zone.

The Netherlands government, which includes the party of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, announced Wednesday that it had requested from Brussels an opt-out from EU rules on asylum, with Prime Minister Dick Schoof declaring that there was an asylum “crisis”.

Meanwhile, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the left-wing Labour Party paid a visit to Rome for talks with Italian counterpart Georgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, to discuss the strategies used by Italy in seeking to reduce migration.

Far-right parties performed strongly in June European elections, coming out on top in France, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call snap elections which resulted in right-winger Michel Barnier, who has previously called for a moratorium on migration, being named prime minister.

We are witnessing the “continuation of a rightward shift in migration policies in the European Union,” said Jerome Vignon, migration advisor at the Jacques Delors Institute think-tank.

It reflected the rise of far-right parties in the European elections in June, and more recently in the two regional elections in Germany, he said, referring to a “quite clearly protectionist and conservative trend”.

Strong message

“Anti-immigration positions that were previously the preserve of the extreme right are now contaminating centre-right parties, even centre-left parties like the Social Democrats” in Germany, added Florian Trauner, a migration specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking university in Brussels.

While the Labour government in London has ditched its right-wing Conservative predecessor administration’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, there is clearly interest in a deal Italy has struck with Albania to detain and process migrants there.

Within the European Union, Cyprus has suspended the processing of asylum applications from Syrian applicants, while laws have appeared authorising pushbacks at the border in Finland and Lithuania.

Under the pretext of dealing with “emergency” or “crisis” situations, the list of exemptions and deviations from the common rules defined by the European Union continues to grow.

All this flies in the face of the new EU migration pact, agreed only in May and coming into force in 2026.

In the wake of deadly attacks in Mannheim and most recently Solingen blamed on radical Islamists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government also expelled 28 Afghans back to their home country for the first time since the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Such gestures from Germany are all the more symbolic given how the country since World War II has tried to turn itself into a model of integration, taking in a million refugees, mainly Syrians in 2015-2016 and then more than a million Ukrainian exiles since the Russian invasion.

Germany is sending a “strong message” to its own public as well as to its European partners, said Trauner.

The migratory pressure “remains significant” with more than 500,000 asylum applications registered in the European Union for the first six months of the year, he said.

‘Climate on impunity’

Germany, which received about a quarter of them alone, criticises the countries of southern Europe for allowing migrants to circulate without processing their asylum applications, but southern states denounce a lack of solidarity of the rest of Europe.

The moves by Germany were condemned by EU allies including Greece and Poland, but Scholz received the perhaps unwelcome accolade of praise from Hungarian right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Moscow’s closest friend in the European Union, when he declared “welcome to the club”.

The EU Commission’s failure to hold countries to account “only fosters a climate of impunity where unilateral migration policies and practices can proliferate,” said Adriana Tidona, Amnesty International’s Migration Researcher.

But behind the rhetoric, all European states are also aware of the crucial role played by migrants in keeping sectors going including transport and healthcare, as well as the importance of attracting skilled labour.

“Behind the symbolic speeches, European leaders, particularly German ones, remain pragmatic: border controls are targeted,” said Sophie Meiners, a migration researcher with the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Even Meloni’s government has allowed the entry into Italy of 452,000 foreign workers for the period 2023-2025.

“In parallel to this kind of new restrictive measures, they know they need to address skilled labour needs,” she said.