Italy: Flawed Migrant Regularization Program
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Opportunity to Learn Lessons for Future
(Milan) An Italian program to provide undocumented migrants with a pathway to residency adopted amid the Covid-19 pandemic did not live up to its promise, Human Rights Watch said today.
It is too early to know how many people will ultimately benefit from it. But flaws in the program s design and implementation resulted in a missed opportunity to address myriad vulnerabilities of undocumented migrants, including widespread exploitation in Italy s agricultural sector. Italy was rightly praised for providing undocumented migrants a pathway to residency amid the pandemic, said Judith Sunderland, associate Europe and Central Asia division director at Human Rights Watch. But the tragic truth is that the effort was designed and rolled out in a way that excluded hundreds of thousands of people and didn t even reach most of the farmworkers it was supposed to benefit.