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The Carrot and the Stick Approach to Migrant Flow Management

Helen Walsh
June 17, 2024

Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, as the most popular leader within the G7 and host of the 2024 Apulia Summit, wielded significant influence over the wording of the section on migration in the Apulia G7 Leaders' Communiqué, a key item on this year's agenda.

Since Meloni's election in 2022, and despite her harsh anti-immigrant campaign rhetoric that year, Italy has admitted hundreds of thousands of immigrants and asylum seekers.

As she moved from the far right closer to the centre, and subsequently became one of the most powerful politicians in Europe, Meloni's language grew more nuanced and pragmatic, focusing on differentiating legal from illegal migrant flows, and framing immigration as human right.

This is not the human right we often think of – the right of everyone to seek asylum from persecution as per the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and to seek international protection as safeguarded by the Geneva Convention on Refugees – although G7 leaders reconfirmed this in the communiqué as well.

Instead, Meloni frames it as the right to stay in one's own country and expect educational and employment opportunities, rather than be forced into the hands of "criminal gangs" of human smugglers who prey on the vulnerable.

Thus, the G7 took a three-pronged approach to migration at the Apulia Summit:

A plan of action is to be created and implemented as swiftly as possible. To that end, G7 interior and security ministers are to start work as soon as possible, Meloni announced at the press briefing.

The ministers are scheduled to meet on October 2–3, 2024, in Mirabella Eclano.

With 6.2% of the word count of the final communiqué devoted to migration, it was clearly an important topic, up from 2020 and 2021 summits where no words were produced on the topic, and from the 2022 Elmau and 2023 Hiroshima summits, which dedicated 113 (1%) and 665 (2%) words, respectively.

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