Migration Policy: An Assessment on the North Africa Emergency Provisions

Emergency rules temporarily modifying migration regulation can be seen as natural experiments that can be exploited to assess the effectiveness of migration policies. In 2011, the Italian Government released the North Africa Emergency Provisions (ENA) temporarily relaxing immigration policies for refugees who fled to Italy as a consequence of the Arab Spring and the Libyan civil war. To take advantage of this experimental opportunity, we run difference-in-differences regressions on an original dataset to estimate the effects of the ENA provisions on the probability of obtaining a residence permit. The dataset includes micro-data self-collected from an important charity in Milan (Casa della Carità) which regularly provides migrants with legal assistance so as to help them to comply with immigration rules. Estimates show that such provisions actually increased the number of residence permits released to migrants entitled to the ENA benefits. On the other hand, migrants who were not entitled to these provisions suffered from exacerbated difficulties in complying with standard regulation.