Welcome to a new episode of the podcast “Integration or ReImmigrazione.” My name is Fabio Loscerbo, I’m an Italian lawyer, and today I want to explain to a U.S. audience how the Italian and European legal system actually works when it comes to migration, integration, and return.
In the United States, migration debates are often framed as a clash between enforcement and amnesty, between mass deportation and permanent regularisation. The Italian and European legal model operates differently. It is neither permissive nor indiscriminate. It is conditional.
At the core of this model is a simple but demanding legal idea: lawful stay is justified by effective integration. Integration here is not a moral concept and not a political aspiration. It is a legal fact. Courts look at concrete elements: stable employment, economic self-sufficiency, respect for the law, social and family ties, and the absence of public-security concerns.
When these elements are present, the legal system recognises that a person has built a real private and social life in the host country. In those cases, removal may become legally disproportionate under European human-rights law. This is where what we call complementary protection comes into play. It is not asylum, and it is not a humanitarian pardon. It is a rights-based safeguard grounded in the protection of private and family life.
And this point is crucial: complementary protection does not create integration. It does not offer time to integrate. It does not promise future inclusion. It simply acknowledges integration that has already happened and prevents a forced removal that would unjustifiably destroy it.
Now, here is where the paradigm “Integration or ReImmigrazione” becomes essential. ReImmigrazione is a brand and a legal concept. It is not translated, and it should not be confused with ideological notions of “remigration” circulating in parts of Europe. ReImmigrazione is not collective, not automatic, and not political. It describes the legal outcome that follows when integration is absent.
If a person has not integrated in a legally meaningful way, the system does not invent a third status, a grey zone, or a permanent exception. In those cases, the State’s power to enforce return remains intact. ReImmigrazione is simply the lawful consequence of failing to meet the integration threshold that justifies continued stay.
A recent decision by the Tribunale di Bologna made this logic very clear. The court protected an individual not because he was present in Italy, but because he had demonstrably integrated. The same reasoning implies the opposite outcome where integration cannot be proven. This is not ideology. It is legal symmetry.
For an American listener, this model may sound unfamiliar, but it offers an important insight. It avoids the extremes of open-ended permanence and blanket enforcement. It relies on individual assessment, proportionality, and evidence. Rights follow responsibility. Legal status follows facts.
So when I say Integration or ReImmigrazione, I am not proposing a new policy. I am describing how the system already works when it is applied consistently. If integration is real, the law protects it. If it is not, return is not a failure of the system. It is the system functioning as designed.
Thank you for listening to this episode of “Integration or ReImmigrazione.” I’ll see you in the next one.
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