The new EU Pact on Migration and Asylum

Oltremani Italia opposes the new European Pact on Migration and Asylum, which represents a clear political choice rather than a mere “technical reform”: to make administrative detention a structural feature of migration governance and to prevent people from effectively exercising their right to asylum.

The new EU Pact on Migration and Asylum does not manage migration: it pushes it back, filters it, makes it invisible and vulnerable to coercion.

Why we reject it

Detention as the norm

“Hubs” and detention centres, including Repatriation Detention Centres (CPRs), already places where rights and personal liberty are systematically restricted, are becoming the norm.

The Pact legitimises the detention of people solely because they entered European territory irregularly or because they seek asylum at the border. This represents a direct attack on the rule of law and fundamental freedoms.

Externalisation and border violence

The European Union pays other countries to stop people before they arrive. This means shifting violence beyond its own borders in order to avoid responsibility for it.

The so called “external borders” are already places of systematic abuse. The Pact strengthens them.

Dismantling the right to asylum

Accelerated procedures, “safe third countries”, preventive exclusions: the right to asylum is being hollowed out.

It is not formally denied, but it is made increasingly difficult to exercise.

The production of exploitation

These policies create irregularity. Irregularity creates vulnerability to coercion. Coercion creates exploitation.

This is not a side effect: it is a structural mechanism that serves an economic system reliant on labour without rights. Migration policies thus contribute to creating a segment of the workforce deprived of protections, serving an economic model that also depends on precariousness.

For Oltremani Italia, opposing this framework is not an abstract position. It is a daily practice and a political choice.

Hosting people, sharing spaces and building pathways to autonomy means placing ourselves in direct contradiction with these policies. It means rejecting in practice a system that produces exclusion and publicly affirming an alternative.

For this reason, now more than ever, it is necessary to strengthen the foundations of the Oltremani Italia community. This is not about “doing more”; it is about being more. More open homes, more people involved, more genuine relationships.

Not only as an act of solidarity, but as a collective political stance.

Expanding this community means increasing our capacity to resist and to build different, concrete and replicable practices.

In a context where rights are restricted by law, creating spaces where those rights become effective is already a political act.

Which side are we on?

Against walls,

against borders that exclude,

against laws that produce marginalisation.

Oltremani will continue to stand on this side.

Against the normalisation of detention,

against the externalisation of borders,

against the use of irregular status as a tool of governance.

And for a society in which housing, rights and dignity are not subordinated to a person’s legal status.

And we choose to say so publicly.