How Exposure to Anti-Migration Policies Backfires: The Electoral Consequences of the Italian NGO Sea Rescue Policy

Does exposure to migration flows increase support for far-right parties? While previous studies support this idea when analyzing emerging parties, few cases focus on far-right parties in governing positions. This question becomes particularly relevant in the Italian case, where radical right parties frame NGOs performing rescue operations in the Central Mediterranean as a pull factor of migration. For this reason, after the right-wing coalition led by Fratelli d’Italia won the elections in 2022, a new sea rescue policy was introduced at the beginning of 2023. The new protocol obliges NGO ships to direct to ports far from migration routes after they execute a rescue operation. According to the government’s aims, the policy proved to be successful at making NGOs’operations logistically more complex. However, in contrast with the party’s promise to introduce a naval blockade to stem immigration, the law’s unintended consequence is that port cities far from migration routes have experienced an increase in migrant arrivals. The study concludes that arrivals to ports of cities affected by the new policy are only related to the activities of NGOs, based on an analysis of NGO operations and total migrants disembarkations. Similarly, through novel data on migrants relocation, I exclude the hypothesis that NGO arrivals work as a further contact channel between local population and migrants, but only as an exposure channel. Then, the paper investigates, through a difference-in-differences design, the dynamics of symbolic policymaking and electoral accountability in the context of migration crisis management across cities affected by the policy. The findings refine the common assumption that mere exposure to migration fuels radical right support by showing that these effects may reverse when these parties are in power.