Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini's Italy: Accelerating The Great Replacement

On May 17th activists connected to the youth wings of Flanders’ Vlaams Belang, Portugal’s Chega, Alternativ Für Deutschland, and other New Right populist groups will be hosting the Remigration Summit in Milan. The event is being marketed as an attempt to de-demonize discussion on European immigration restriction and reframe the conversation around mass deportations in hopes of influencing established conservative and populist parties.

Italian media has connected the summit to Lega, a member of Italy’s ruling coalition whose leader Matteo Salvini serves as deputy Prime Minister under Fratelli Di Italia’s Giorgia Meloni. Salvini was one of the first in Europe to embrace and utilize the slogan of “Remigration,” which his identitarian supporters have cited as their inspiration.

Now in power, the Italian right has mimicked Donald Trump in the United States, representing a new meme-driven populist politics that is falling through the gap between what they say and what they do. The present Italian government sailed to victory in 2022 on a mandate of ending non-European immigration, featuring unambiguous promises to embark in the mass deportation of illegal immigrants. The media saavy Salvini’s profile grew to prominence in 2018, when he was summoned to run the country’s interior ministry as an olive branch hoping to blunt grassroots anti-immigration protests — often led by Fascist and radical ethno-nationalist organizations — which swelled to the thousands, producing whirlwinds that began destabilizing Italy’s notoriously corrupt and undemocratic political patronage system.

The Italian populist right’s commanding victory has produced skin-deep symbolic victories in the fight against immigration, but in executed policy it has been responsible for accelerating the problem. Once the votes were counted, the emphasis was shifted to the legalistic issue of irregular migration, with elected officials brazenly dismissing the spirit of the people’s grievance: too many Asians and Africans in Europe.

Conservative supporters of Prime Minister Meloni and her coalition partners have countered accusations of electoral betrayal by pointing to tangible deliverables on the question of illegal immigration, such as paying the Tunisian government to prevent migrant boat expeditions and later a deal with Albania to build detention centers for asylum seekers to await deportation off Italian soil. Indeed, following an initial surge of migrant arrivals, the Meloni government has succeeded in reducing illegal border entries by 60% from 2023 to 2024, crediting the craftiness of her Albanian deal for the results.

This curtailment of illegal boat migrants, mildly impressive on the surface, has been completely overshadowed by the Italian government’s shocking 2023 overhaul of the Flussi Decree, leading to the country’s biggest expansion in legal migration from Asia and Africa since the early 2000s.

Under the Flussi Decree, Meloni and Salvini have achieved the opposite of remigration. Instead of the mass deportations promised, the alteration to immigration law solves the problem of illegal immigrants by simply granting those illicitly living on Italian soil residency permits, making it significantly more difficult for future governments to deport them.

Additionally, Meloni’s updated Flussi Decree has drastically jacked up the quota for legal immigration from non-EU countries from 30,850 under her center-left predecessor Giuseppe Conte to at least 452,000 for the period between 2023 and 2025. University of Milan migration expert Maurizio Ambrosini estimates that Meloni’s 452,000 new legal migrants are in reality 1.5 million due to Italy’s lax family reunification laws, which enables chain migration and will radically, perhaps permanently, change Italy’s ethnic balance.

The origin of the problem lies in the strong links between Lega and FdI to Italian big business. Meloni, who has governed, to the disappointment of supporters and joy of global elites, as an economic Thatcherite and an Atlanticist neo-conservative, has enthusiastically embraced industrialist, banking, agribusiness and tourism sector claims that Italy’s aging population and low birth rate requires radical increases in imported labor, despite data showing Italy is one of the Eurozone’s leaders in youth unemployment (20%). Meloni’s regime has sought to present its decision to flood the nation with an almost unprecedented number of non-Europeans as a compromise, pointing to a study her government commissioned in 2023 calling for Italy to import at least 833,000 migrants in three years simply to stay economically competitive.

Even if one were to grant the questionable liberal capitalist premise of perpetual labor shortages, the state under Meloni has gone out of its way to actively show a preference for non-white migrants. Following an Italian media generated scandal in 2024 over awarding Argentinian president Javier Milei Italian citizenship (seven of eight of Milei’s great grandparents were immigrants from Italy, the other being Croatian), the Meloni regime was accused of racism for giving a “foreigner” an Italian passport under the country’s jus sanguinis law while denying the same for Africans and Middle Easterners who have lived in Italy for years. Approximately 40% of Argentinians and 30% of Uruguayans are descended from Italian migrants.

In response to the supposed controversy, the Italian government reacted by substantially tightening Italy’s citizenship by descent rules so that it that it prevents most working age descendants of 19th century Italian-Americans, Italian-Argentines, Italian-Uruguayans, and Italian-Brazilians from receiving citizenship and immigrating to Europe. Around 46,000 Argentinians received Italian citizenship from 2023 to 2024 alone, suggesting the existence of a potential pool of 10s of millions of highly assimilable people from the Western Hemisphere that can be attracted to the country. Additionally, the regulatory change has also made it difficult for the children of native-born Italian parents who live abroad to obtain citizenship, potentially making them stateless.

Some Italian political commentators have celebrated these changes, citing that many don’t live in Italy, don’t pay taxes, and don’t speak Italian, in a demonstration of politically correct xenophobia. Shutting the door to new world Italians while whisking it open to Asia and Africa effectively trades Italian-Argentines like René Favaloro, the father of coronary bypass surgery, and Raul Pescara, credited by some with inventing the helicopter, for ethnically incompatible Moroccan and Nigerian Doordashers and Uber drivers.

Lega, a junior partner in the Meloni government, has sought to distance himself from these policies, but Italian patriots have broadly concluded that their performance has been unsatisfactory in respects to politically resisting these changes. Deputy Prime Minister Salvini continues to occasionally gives fiery speeches against immigrants and the corruption of the status quo, but stops short of tending his resignation, making him an accomplice to the largest wave of non-white immigration Italy has seen in decades.

Those seeking remigration beyond campaign slogans and viral antics should look elsewhere.