NYT | 01.02.2019

Palermos Bürgermeister Olando hat im Gegensatz zum Salvini-Dekret einigen Geflüchteten eine Aufenthaltsgenehmigung erteilt.

By signing their applications, Mr. Orlando hopes to invite a legal challenge by the government that he can take all the way to Italy’s highest court. He intends to argue that Mr. Salvini’s measures are unconstitutional and violate the migrants’ human rights.

“I cannot accept that you produce criminality,” Mr. Orlando said in an interview last month in his grand office, surrounded by gilded Islamic manuscripts, a letter from Pope Francis and a paperweight of the Dalai Lama.

Many liberal mayors across the country, from Naples to Florence to Milan, applauded Mr. Orlando’s intention to defy the government, which he first announced at the end of December.

This week, Tuscany, Umbria, Sardinia and the northern region of Piedmont filed a legal complaint against the Security Decree, charging that it actually increased criminal activity and decreased the possibility of economic integration….

Acting on the authority of Mr. Salvini’s Security Decree, the police last week cleared out an integration center in Castelnuovo di Porto, north of Rome. Mr. Salvini said the closure of such centers, where about 6,000 refugee applicants across the country receive shelter, would save the state about six million euros.

Mr. Salvini pledged to carry out a similar evacuation of an even larger center in Sicily later this year.

Such moves continue to divide Italians. The mayor of Castelnuovo di Porto expressed disgust with Mr. Salvini and took in a Somali woman. Other residents rallied around children who attended the local school and a 19-year-old Senegalese striker for the local soccer team.

„Italy’s Crackdown on Migrants Meets a Grass-Roots Resistance“