“Wrestling with ghosts”: the “Security Law” in Italy as governing through discretion and withdrawal

In December 2018, the Italian parliament voted to approve the so-called “Security Law” (L 132/2018). Previously introduced as governmental decree by then interior minister, Matteo Salvini of the right-wing League party, it covers a wide range of topics. Crucially, however, it has brought about massive changes to the reception system for migrants, the legal statuses available to them, and the administrative procedures that migrants have to navigate in Italy.
In my contribution, I will primarily focus on the latter, tracing how the political context at the time, the legal content of the law itself and the “multiple action prescriptions” (Evans & Hupe 2020) of street-level bureaucrats intersected to create a situation of increased incoherence and confusion in the administration of migration in Italy – both for migrants and their supporters, and for street-level bureaucrats themselves. To do so, I draw on ethnographic research and interviews conducted in 2018/19, employing a situated approach from the perspective of everyday experiences of migrants and their supporters at a migrant drop-in centre in Palermo, Sicily. Ultimately, I argue that the “Security Law” exacerbated the always-already inherently discretionary dynamics of administration in a way that led to the systematic marginalisation of migrants beyond the letter of the law itself.
The paper will contribute to the notion of “ghost bureaucracy” and its bordering function in the following ways. By focusing on a specific case and connecting its political, legal and administrative dimensions, I show that they are not to be understood hierarchically, but rather interact across different levels. More precisely, I argue that the law’s mode of introduction and its content must be understood vis-à-vis the rationales and practices of front-line administrators tasked with its implementation. Only by taking into account their capacity for discretion and withdrawal do the “Security Law’s” incoherent and contradictory provisions emerge not as faulty or flawed, but as key elements in its aim at deregulating migrants’ presence in Italy (so they can be cast as a “threat to society” afterwards). Finally, this means that the “ghostliness” of bureaucracy is not limited to modes of inaccessibility and withdrawal, but also extends to the actual encounters between administrators and clients. Particularly under conditions of increased legal ambiguity and incoherence, both are thus engaged in forms of “shadow boxing”, or “wrestling with ghosts”: grappling with something that is ephemeral and difficult to grasp, but ultimately has immediate and potentially violent consequences for everyday life.