Immigration through the Humanitarian Corridors is safe and legal, and depends on the authority of Caritas as a pastoral body within the Italian Catholic Church, which is present in every parish in every city in the country.
This structure has, however, has permitted a sort of contamination of the world outside of the community expressly tasked with hosting refugees, and the study granted insight into this dynamic in many dioceses.
In some, only family members and friends of the social workers, volunteers, or mentor families became involved in hosting refugees. In others, even local authorities, political leaders, teachers, and the parents of children in local schools jumped in. In about ten places, local business owners who employed refugees got involved in the project as well.
Regardless of the project’s final results, in which only a portion of the people resettled in Italy remained there and reached a point of financial and social integration, this spillover effect was undoubtedly one of the great successes of the Humanitarian Corridors program.
First of all, the arrival of Humanitarian Corridors beneficiaries in Italy gave a face and a name to the abstract, political debate on migration. This made it possible to have concrete conversations about it, including with local political authorities. One mayor explained:
"I wanted to see what the family was like, and see what it would be like to welcome people in an organized and positive way. Because we work with Caritas, and, most importantly, with this particular parish, I know that what they do is organized and positive. So I had reasons to expect that the project would be characterized by openness and a positive approach. And it seems to me that it is… Before, we worked with the police to host four refugees [but they] would go from place to place, vanish, come and go – it was a big mess, and they also brought around guests of a certain kind… We were letting them use an apartment that belonged to the town, and there is a cooperative we work with here that was assisting them, but the experience was not positive. One of the reasons for that was that we didn’t build anything [with them]."
In any case, since the refugees participating in the Humanitarian Corridors arrived in a safe and legal way, with the backing of a local Caritas group made up of social workers and volunteers who were well known in their local areas, even people who weren’t involved with the project could meet the refugees and get to know there stories and how the Humanitarian Corridors worked. For example, in one diocese, the neighbor of a refugee family participated in their on-site interview, introducing herself in this way:
"The wonderful thing – in addition to having met this family [the refugees], whom I really love – but the other wonderful thing is that I met them [the volunteers]. She [refugee] and I just get along so well, and I have a great relationship with him [refugee], too. She has become a true friend. And I say it from the heart: this has been a wonderful thing for me."
One local Caritas director declared that:
"The Humanitarian Corridors are a precious model, one that fosters inclusion, integration on a small scale that we might call ‘familiar,’ by generating relationships defined by hospitality."
A few months later, one of the resettled refugees started an internship at a local business. The business owner was friends with one of the volunteers with the project, and agreed to interview him as a prospective hire. Once he had confirmed that Caritas had helped the young man to learn enough Italian to get by in the workplace, and that he had skills from previous jobs in Ethiopia, he offered him a job.
Job opportunities have been one of the most concrete consequences of local spillover, because offering a job to refugees means investing not only in a friendship, but, above all, in a business project involving substantial outlay of economic resources.
