“The Italian “Emigration Code” of 1919”, Convegno internazionale “Fifth Biennal Conference of the European Society for Comparative Legal History: Laws across Codes and Laws Decoded”, 28-30 giugno 2018, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris

Between 1860 and 1914 about fiftytwo millions people left Europe in search of better life and working conditions. The Irish, British and Germans emigrated en masse, between 1840 and 1880; while, starting from the 1870s, Poles, Austrians, Hungarians and Jewess left their countries. Quite a big emigration quota came from Southern Europe: the Spanish and Portuguese started from 1850s, while in Italy the highest emigration peaks were reached between 1876 and 1914, when more than fourteen millions people left the country. In Italy the political debate on emigration and the enacted legislation clearly reflected the ideologies and views present in the country since its unification (1861). Criticism and disfavour towards emigration, considered for its social and economic consequences and without any deep analysis of its causes, led to the enactment of various administrative acts from Government (the Circolare Menabrea, the Circolare Lanza and the Circolare Nicotera), disarticulated and totally inappropriate to face the migration phenomenon. In 1888 only the first law concerning emigration was formally enacted: nevertheless, such a law was a sort of “police law” intended to assure public order in the country and guarantee the control on emigration on the part of the public security authority. The first real attempt to protect emigrants was done only with the enactment of law n. 23/1901, aimed to reorganise and revise all the discipline in the matter. After the beginning of the new century many different laws, regulating various aspects of emigration (migrants’ judicial protection, citizenship, recovery etc.), followed, modifying, correcting and integrating the law of 1901, until the enactment of the Testo Unico n. 2205 of 1919 aimed to collect, coordinate and integrate all previous scattered discipline in the migration matter, giving place to a real Italian “Emigration Code”. Aim of the paper is to investigate the role of such an officious “code” in the regulation of the matter by the Italian law. How such a “code” was conceived and drafted? What was the relationship of its legal rules to the civil and penal codes’ norms in the emigration matter? How did it work in the reform of emigration law? How did it affect (if so) the Italian (codified) legal system?