Regularisations as social policy tools: bottom-up claims and policy responses in Italy and Spain

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need to ensure that all migrants, including undocumented ones, have access to social protection and healthcare has
been largely stressed by international actors and pro-migrant organisations. In spite
of these pressures, national responses have differed widely. Focusing on the cases
of Italy and Spain, this paper analyses the measures adopted in these Southern EU
countries in response to similar pro-regularisation mobilisations emerged in 2020,
focusing on the institutional and political factors that may explain opposite policy
outputs. Accordingly, the Italian government took advantage of this exceptional
crisis to implement a regularisation measure invoking public health principles
while limiting its scope to those groups that more directly responded to the
country’s economic needs. Contrary to that, the Spanish government openly
discarded to adopt a collective measure, while it introduced less openly visible
procedures to facilitate individual-basis regularisations and access to social rights.
Understanding regularisations as social policy tools, this paper ultimately suggests
that the ways in which political actors frame and mobilise around the regularisation
issue may result in different patterns of social in/exclusion, depending on the
underground logic that justify a regularisation: utilitarianism or deservingness of
membership.