Complementary Protection as the Only Legal Laboratory for the “Integration or ReImmigration” Paradigm
The decision adopted by the Genoa Territorial Commission for the Recognition of International Protection on December 18, 2025 offers a rare opportunity to observe how an immigration system can legally connect lawful stay to integration without abandoning enforcement or due process.
This decision is not an act of humanitarian leniency, nor a form of discretionary regularization. It is the application of a precise legal rule embedded in Italian immigration law, one that has no true equivalent in the United States.
Under Italian law, complementary protection operates outside the traditional asylum framework. It does not depend on persecution, armed conflict, or generalized violence in the country of origin. Nor is it grounded in subjective vulnerability. Instead, it is based on an objective legal assessment: whether removal would be incompatible with the degree of integration already achieved within the host society. Integration, in this context, is not a political aspiration or a moral value. It is treated as a legally relevant fact.
This is a crucial distinction for an American audience. In the U.S. system, lawful presence is almost always tied to predefined status categories and statutory relief mechanisms. Integration, however real in practice, is not itself a legal foundation for remaining in the country. Italian complementary protection is different. It is the only procedure within the Italian legal order in which integration is elevated from a policy goal to a decisive legal criterion.
For this reason, complementary protection functions as a legal laboratory. It is the sole model in which the law actively measures integration and uses it to determine whether continued presence is lawful. Other residence permits are anchored to formal elements such as employment contracts, family relationships, or enrollment status. International protection depends on conditions external to the host country. Only complementary protection places the individual’s integration trajectory at the center of the legal analysis.
From this structure emerges, in a non-ideological way, the paradigm “Integration or ReImmigration.” The paradigm is not imposed from outside the law; it is revealed by the law itself. If integration can legitimately justify lawful stay, then the absence of integration cannot logically support indefinite permanence. ReImmigration, in this sense, is not a punitive response, nor a rejection of protection. It is the systemic counterpart of an integration-based model of lawful presence.
What the Genoa Commission’s decision demonstrates is that integration and return are not opposing political choices but legally connected outcomes within the same normative framework. The decision does not grant permanent settlement, nor does it weaken state authority. It temporarily blocks removal because integration has reached legal relevance, while implicitly confirming that permanence is conditional and not automatic.
In this way, complementary protection exposes a broader truth about immigration governance. The law is already capable of distinguishing between integration that warrants protection and non-integration that must lead to return. What remains confined to one legal institute could, in theory, be generalized as a governing principle: lawful stay conditioned on responsibility, participation, and social embeddedness, rather than on indefinite tolerance.
Conclusion
Complementary protection is not an anomaly within Italian immigration law. It is its most advanced expression. It is the only existing model in which lawful stay is directly linked to integration, treated as a measurable and legally decisive fact. For this reason, it constitutes the true legal laboratory of the “Integration or ReImmigration” paradigm. Not ideology, not discretion, but law governing consequences.
Avv. Fabio Loscerbo
Attorney at Law – Immigration Law
Registered EU Transparency Register Lobbyist – ID 280782895721-36
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