The calm after the storm? Mobilizing against immigration as a non-salient issue in Italy

The article examines protest mobilization and framing strategies by anti-immigration actors in Italy during the Covid-19 health crisis. As the pandemic drew the attention of the public, governments, and the media away from issues of migration to Europe, collective actors mobilizing against immigration lost the spotlight they had enjoyed, at least since 2015, in public debates. Taking Italy as a paradigmatic case of protest mobilization around migrants’ arrival, we examine the collective action frames and repertoires of contention of anti-immigration actors in times of limited public salience of migration and asylum. The article rests on new data derived from 25 semi-structured interviews conducted in 2020-21 with anti-immigration activists mobilizing via institutional party politics as well as extra-institutional protest action. The results show that Covid-19 has opened new opportunities to stigmatize migrants and refugees as carriers of the coronavirus, but that these collective action frames were little successful in bounding the anti-immigration movement together. Whilst actors in different arenas converge on the main causes, impacts and possible responses to international migration, groups mobilizing in the electoral arena now follow distinct, if not openly contrasting, strategies to their protest counterparts. In this respect, our findings integrate existing knowledge on the politicization of migration “in times of crisis” by offering a comprehensive understanding of this process at times in which the migration issue is “dormient”, i.e. when collective action frames are renegotiated, and new networks of mobilization emerge.