Unaccompanied minors in Italy: The disparity in access to welfare system for migrants and refugees

Abstract

Globally, more than 218,000 unaccompanied and separated children were registered in 2024, and Italy – the primary Mediterranean point of arrival – received 69% of all unaccompanied minors landing in EU mediterranean countries. Although Italy’s Law 47/2017 (the Zampa Law) formally guarantees equal protection for all unaccompanied minors regardless of migration status, significant disparities in access to welfare services persist in practice. This study aimed to analyze the extent to which migration status influences unaccompanied minors’ access to the Italian welfare system and to identify the main barriers and facilitators shaping their trajectories within child protection structures. The study addressed four research questions: how different migration statuses influence UAMs’ access to welfare services; what factors shape their decisions regarding asylum applications and other legal pathways; what structural, legal, and social factors determine their inclusion in or exclusion from welfare services; and how frontline professionals interpret their roles and how professional education and institutional conditions affect their practice. A mixed-methods design was adopted, combining secondary quantitative analysis of official data from the Italian Ministry of Labor and Social Policies, Eurostat, and UNICEF for the period 2023-2025, with qualitative analysis comprising legal and policy document review and eighteen semi-structured interviews with key actors – including staff from NGO, UN agencies, government and institutional actors, academic researchers, social workers and voluntary guardians. Qualitative data were analyzed using codebook thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2012) with MaxQDA, organized around four themes: migration policy, organizational culture, intercultural sensitivity, and academic culture. The findings confirmed that migration status – including legal category, nationality, gender, age and region of reception – functions as structural determinant of welfare access despite the formally universalist framework. The most direct evidence was found in the differentiated treatment of Ukrainian unaccompanied minor under the EU Temporary Protection Mechanism, who accessed services through an expedited pathway unavailable to peers from other nationalities. Nationality-based stratification in asylum recognition rates, a critical SAI second reception capacity deficit, severe staffing shortages in first reception facilities, delayed guardian appointments, and sharp regional inequalities – most starkly illustrated by the contrast between Sicily (0.6% integration pathway access; 32.4% voluntary abandonment) and Lombardy – collectively produced a “colander state” in which formal rights are structurally perforated. Street-level bureaucratic discretion by frontline professionals was found to generate further differential access under conditions of resource scarcity and institutional constraint. The study concluded that bridging the gap between the Zampa Law’s progressive architecture and its uneven implementation requires multi-annual funding commitments, expansion of SAI capacity, reform of the guardianship system, protection of the transition to adulthood, and mandatory specialized training for professionals. These findings contribute to debates on citizenship and social rights (Marshall & Bottomore, 1992), Southern European welfare regime characteristics (Ferrera, 1996a), and the intersection of social work and migration (Gómez-Ciriano et al., 2023) with concrete implications for policy and professional practice in Italy and across the European Union.