Punitive environments and asylum seekers as rights abusers
The EU Pact in Italy
The road to the implementation of the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum in Italy is quite ambivalent: on the one hand, as lawyers and NGOs have commented, it will be very likely delayed; on the other hand, few measures contained in the Pact have already been enforced. More precisely, some coercive measures have been progressively introduced in the last three years, while the official start of the Pact in June 2026 will require a radical restructuring of the Italian asylum system.
This restructuring cannot be separated from the recent votes in the European Parliament concerning the new EU return rules. In March 2026, the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee endorsed a negotiating mandate for a Regulation establishing a ‘common system for returns’, a term that sounds rather euphemistic and can be understood more as a system for deportations. In June 2026, after a provisional agreement between the Council and Parliament, the European Parliament gave its final approval to the Return Regulation. These votes are not merely technical steps in the legislative process. These measures consolidate a broader punitive turn in EU migration policy, in which deportation is accelerated and increasingly detached from the safeguards intended to protect people seeking asylum. This shift is reflected in practices such as detention, including of children, home raids, and the seizure of electronic devices. The parliamentary approval of return hubs outside the EU, stricter rules targeting so-called absconding, and measures that can reduce support for people who do not comply with return procedures further confirm that the Pact must be understood in conjunction with the expanding deportation machinery that now surrounds it.
Indeed, many provisions included in the Pact have been partially inspired by the spatial and administrative tactics employed by Italian authorities just as other measures were devised by drawing on practices tested in Greece. However, the Pact and its imminent future effects on asylum seekers’ lives cannot be analysed in isolation from broader sociopolitical transformations at play and that exceed by far “migration” and “asylum” as alleged bounded fields.
In this piece I shed light on two key intertwined trajectories that converge in hampering migrants from becoming asylum seekers and that are strengthened by the Pact, with a particular focus on Italy: the making of punitive environments and the representation of asylum seekers as rights’ abusers. These mutually interrelated trajectories show that, beyond the legal and bureaucratic hurdles that migrants will encounter when attempting to become asylum seekers, the Pact will fundamentally trample on their life’s project.
Nevertheless, the Pact is not a stand-alone piece of legislation and, in fact, should be situated as part of wider juridical and political shifts. The Italian case is particularly relevant in this respect, as the road to the implementation of the Pact went almost in parallel with the approval of two Security Bills, in 2025 and in 2026, and it was preceded by the enforcement of border procedures in 2023. Taking the Pact, the Return Regulations and the Security Bills together, it emerges that punitive environments do not affect “migrants” only but rather, both non-citizens who seek asylum and some citizens.
Moreover, some key measures contained in the Pact had already been put in place in Italy beforehand as informal practices, such as the obligation for asylum seekers to stay in a given area or the residence requirement. These have now been codified in the Pact, as “Allocation of applicants to a geographical area” (art.8) and “Restrictions of freedom of movement” (art.9), contained in the EU 2024/1346 Directive. As I illustrate below, these arbitrary mobility restrictions reveal not only the centrality of spatial confinement but also that the Pact is geared more broadly towards the suffocation of migrants’ lives and projects.
The making of punitive environments
If read in conjunction with the two Security Bills enforced in Italy, the approval of the Pact foregrounds a generalised punitiveness in the restructuring of the EU’s migration agenda: migrants’ life will be made unliveable through the production of punitive environments. To give an example from the Pact, the new Asylum and Migration Management Regulation (AMMR), punishes “unruly” asylum seekers who have dodged the mobility restrictions of the Dublin Regulation, by excluding them from the reception system as a whole, including the pocket money, from the moment when they are notified of the transfer to the responsible Member State. Indeed, the punitive environment is not equivalent to more discretionary detention and confinement for asylum seekers. Rather, it concerns the potential punishment of their unruly conduct. As clearly stated in the Pact (AMMR section), “in order to limit the possibility that the behaviour of applicants could lead to the cessation or shift of responsibility to another Member State” the time limits leading to cessation of responsibility are extended when the person escapes the national territory or “absconds to evade a transfer”.
To be clear, what is at stake is partly a punitive twist in immigration law as Maurice Stierl and I have recently argued. Yet, what is remarkable is punitiveness as a latent condition that strengthens migrants’ socioeconomic precarity and practices of criminalisation that are not limited to law’s infringements. To put it differently, the punitive dimension does not necessarily translate into actual punishment or detention: rather, punitivity exceeds the implementation of punitive measures and, in a similar way to “deportability” (De Genova, 2024), it consists in the possibility, reiterated on a daily basis, of being punished. Hence, punitiveness concerns the persistent anxiety of being object of punishment, through detention or expulsion, but also by being criminalised on a social level, for one’s very existence. This means that disregarding whether punitive laws are enforced, they enhance migrants’ precarity and exploitability. An insight into the Italian Security Bills helps us seeing that such punitiveness does not concern migrants only and, in fact, it will reverberate on citizens as well.
Although this is not directly contained in it, a lateral reading of the Pact, enables us situating this latter in undergoing wider sociopolitical transformations. Indeed, among the measures introduced, the Security Bill that passed in the Italian Parliament in 2025 exacerbates a purely punitive approach to migrants who, disregarding their legal status, organise or participate in uprisings, or engage in passive resistance in detention centres as well as in the hotspots (1). In all the above-mentioned cases, migrants will be punished with a prison sentence. Yet, the criminalisation of uprisings is not narrowed to spaces of migration confinement. It also includes prisons and, thus, Italian detainees. Moreover, the security bill turns the occupation of buildings into a crime, even when occupations are carried out to house families in need. The enforcement of “red zones” in Italy followed a similar logic. In autumn 2024, the Ministry of Interior ordered local governments (Prefectures) to establish “red zones” in several Italian cities including Bologna, Milan, Rome, Florence Naples and Palermo. The aim was to identify “through specific ordinances, urban areas where dangerous individuals with criminal records are prohibited from entering, and then order their removal”.
Individuals who are labelled as socially dangerous receive an urban banning order (Daspo) and, if they do not comply with that, they are subject to a three-month prison sentence. To date, more than 70% of the people who received an urban banning order in Italy are not Italian citizens. The high percentage, which is the outcome of racialised identity checks, has been flagged up by the government to show that Red Zones help protecting citizens from socially dangerous subjects, and conflating these with the image of non-white foreigners. Therefore, the implementation of Red Zones, confirmed under the Security Bill passed in 2026 (2), enhances racialising bordering mechanisms and, jointly, makes generalised police checks acceptable. Punitive environments target migrants and refugees, turning hostility into a systematic police harassment. They trigger a pervasive anxiety of punitiveness, drawing on the widespread prejudice of migrants as predators and abusers of the welfare system.
Nevertheless, even if migrants and racialised citizens will be more harmed than others, many of the measures introduced to craft punitive environments, criminalise citizens’ conducts and violate the right to protest. This policing of the urban poor is characterised less by states of exception than by a proliferation of administrative measures, ad hoc decrees and petty regulations enforced on the edge of the law. Thus, the production of punitive environments for criminalising migrants’ lives unfolds into a widespread, although differential, erosion of socio-economic rights of citizens as well.
The “abused” right to asylum
The second and overlapping trajectory strengthened by the Pact, concerns the progressive hollowing out of asylum. This is enacted by combining a geographical fixation of asylum seekers with the curtailment of humanitarian and financial support, all in the name of fighting migrants’ alleged abuse of the asylum system. This trajectory is clearly visible in the Italian context, where the obligation imposed on some asylum seekers to remain in a restricted geographical area, a hosting centre or hotspot has become a contested practice. A litigation that was resolved in February 2026 at the Palermo Court encapsulates well the entanglements between mobility restrictions and preventive exclusion from the right to asylum. The Court established that the asylum case of a Pakistani national who, after landing in Lampedusa, had been channelled into the border procedure, should be actually examined according to the ordinary procedure. The asylum applicant had been confined and subjected to a residence requirement into the Extraordinary Reception Centre of Villa Sikania, located in Sicily, in the province of Agrigento. The centre is used for transferring migrants from Lampedusa. As the association of immigration lawyers ASGI has reported, people seeking asylum often have to wait weeks or months before being able to submit their asylum application.
The arbitrary confinement of asylum seekers into specific areas goes hand in hand with the sedimentation of a widespread discourse that depicts them as abusers of the right to asylum and of the reception system at large. Asylum seekers whose applications are rejected in second instance, as well as those who obtain international protection, are expelled from the hosting system and stop receiving the pocket money in a faster way than in the past. Moreover, under the Law 50, 2023, the precarisation of asylum seekers has been enforced by cutting the services to which they were previously entitled in the reception system, in particular, Italian languages courses and psychological support. The same law also opened so-called Temporary Holding Centres (CTRA), to enforce border procedures. These centres are less monitored than the Extraordinary Reception Centres (CAS) and the Reception and Integration System (SAI). They are managed in a highly discretionary way, asylum seekers held there are not entitled to pocket money and receive a reduced humanitarian support overall.
One year later, the Italian Parliament passed a law granting authorities the power to expel people from the asylum procedure if, among other criteria, they leave the hosting centre where they are obliged to stay on the basis of the residence requirement and the geographical restrictions introduced under the abovementioned Law 50, 2023. Therefore, mobility restrictions and the geographical fixation of asylum seekers exceed physical constraints. In fact, they reveal that the panoply of legal and administrative measures of migration containment disrupts migrants’ journeys and life projects more radically.
Conclusion
The Pact has been aptly criticized for fast-tracking deportations and widening the legal leeway for detaining asylum seekers. However, it is likewise fundamental to shed light also on less conspicuous crackdowns on migrants’ life projects, enforced through a fight on so called “secondary movements” – which include the obligation to stay in a given geographical area or hosting centre – and by depicting women, men and children who seek asylum as rights’ abusers. The punitive twist boosted by the Pact exceeds the enforcement of laws devised for detaining and deporting people who seek asylum in Europe. Criminalisation is a political and not merely a juridical act. Even if we cannot predict the numbers of asylum applicants who will be punished by the new European and national immigration laws, governing migrants through punitive environments entails enhancing their vulnerability and exploitability. Punitiveness, as a latent condition, criminalises what Michel Foucault defined as “infra-legal illegalism” (Foucault, 2015): unruly conducts that do not necessarily infringe the law but that are potentially punished for their attempt to dodge spatial restrictions.
However, reading the Pact as a stand-alone piece of legislation would lead us to think that such downward motion in the access to rights and welfare concerns migrants only. As the Italian case demonstrates, the spiral of criminalisation and socioeconomic precarity affects citizens as well. The intertwining of immigration laws, security bills and urban banning orders shows that the production of “social dangerousness” is entrenched in the representation of asylum seekers and some citizens as rights abusers. The Pact’s extensive text and its technocratic language confront us with the challenge of struggling for the democratization of knowledge about migration policies and laws. This must begin with concrete examples of how these latter exacerbate and are inflected by laws, and policies that affect citizens too.
References
De Genova, N. (2024). The legal production of Mexican/migrant “illegality”. In Latino Studies: A 20th Anniversary Reader (pp. 431-462). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
Foucault, M. (2016). The punitive society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972-1973. Springer.
1 Any person who, while detained in detention centers or confined in a hotspot “participates in a riot through acts of violence or threats or resistance to the execution of orders issued for the maintenance of order […] committed by three or more persons acting in concert, shall be punished by imprisonment for a term of one to four years […]acts of resistance also include conduct involving passive resistance”; moreover, “those who instigate, organize, or lead the riot shall be punished by imprisonment for a term of one year and six months to five years (Art. 27, Security Bill, 2025).
2 According to the 2026 Security Bill, “the prefect may identify specific urban areas characterized by serious or repeated incidents of crime or illegal activity, from which individuals who have been reported to the authorities in the past five years are to be removed”.
Martina Tazzioli is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Bologna