Migration policy: did an emergency provision displace standard rules? Evidence from Italy

In 2011, to manage the exceptional flow of people escaping North Africa, the Italian government released the North Africa Emergency (Emergenza Nord Africa, ENA) provision, temporarily relaxing migration policies for some categories of asylum seekers. Using data from an important charity, we perform baseline difference-in-differences regressions to investigate the impact of this emergency rule on the probability of migrants regularizing their legal status. We exploit the timing of the enactment of the ENA accessibility criteria—such that potential beneficiaries learned of its existence only after the realization of the state of entitlement—to identify the effects of the emergency policy provision on treated and control groups of immigrants. The results show an increased number of successful applications in favor of eligible individuals, although a dramatic boost in the denial rate for other migrants is also observed. This suggests either that some migrants suffered displacement due to the emergency rule, and/or that improper submissions of ENA-oriented applications have occurred. We extend our analysis to the use of multilevel models to shed light on these possible (non-mutually excludable) explanations. Results seem to support the presence of some rule-displacement effects, although the existence of a set of wrongful submissions cannot be excluded. We discuss these possibilities from a policy perspective.