Abstract

Policies for immigrants aim at combating the causes of social exclusion of immigrant citizens, as well as integrating them into the civil society through specific programs and actions. In Italy, regional policies for the integration of immigrants have followed different paths and are now highly differentiated, also due to the territorial fragmentation in the access to welfare that characterizes the country. Starting from that premise, this article analyzes the degree of institutionalization of policies for immigrants in Tuscany and Veneto, with the aim of interpreting similarities and differences between the two cases on four fronts: the cognitive dimension, the prescriptive dimension (i.e. rules), the formalization of roles and procedures, as well as the financial and organizational resources mobilized by regional programs.