Assisted Migration and the Marshall Plan: the Italian Case

Italy, as a country of arrival for many migrants from outside the European Union, is currently receiving much international media attention because of the ongoing socalled ‘migration crisis’. Historically, however, Italy has been a country of outward migration. This article analyses the history of Italian migration during the post-Second World War years. This crucial period in Italian history was characterised by economic reconstruction and recovery led by international institutions and the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan’s provisions on migration have received little scholarly attention, and this neglect is particularly pronounced in the case of Italy. This historical research draws mainly from documents retrieved from the Marshall Plan’s collections at the archives of the Bank of Italy, originally produced in the aftermath of the Second World War. The article is divided into four parts. The first section outlines the problem and embeds it within the existing literature on the history of migration policy in Italy. The second part examines the induced aid and migration policies of postwar Italy. The third part considers the architecture of the migration policy of that time, e.g. funding allocations and requests submitted to the United States for destination countries, such as Canada, or continents such as Latin America and Africa. Finally, the last section provides more in-depth analysis of the erp itself and its impact on Italian out-migration. The article concludes that cooperating and joint programming is a necessity for states in the management of migration.