In recent years, it is common perception that immigration policies and government choices concerning migrants’ residential hospitality in Italy are linked.  

Public debate has stressed this links at times by highlithing the costs, other times the benefits that would come from government commitment to provide hospitality to refugees in dedicated/ad hoc facilities.

This way, reception centers have been seen as one of the most visible and debated aspects of the national migration policies. Today, residential reception is a relatively marginal phenomenon. It would be a mistake, however, to see in the interventions of Minniti and then Salvini the single or main cause: the reception system had already exhausted its functions before the decrees of 2017-2018. The authors reconstruct the main phases of the process of de-qualification of reception system, which, especially since 2011, has contributed to change profoundly its conception and aims: reception today is understood as “surveillance” and “control”, rather than being projected to social inclusion and autonomy of people.