Refugees and asylum seekers in Italy are ‘stuck’ because they often end up
caught in the legal and social limbo of the reception system. The effects of the pandemic
and lockdown measures to avoid transmission have stacked on top of these conditions.
This scenario, along with the Italian policy field increases the vulnerabilisation of refu-
gees and asylum seekers for their labour exploitation, but also create a space for media
struggle, where political forces and social entrepreneurs clash and manipulate the issue
of “asylum seekers”. This introductory chapter analyses these aspects, introducing the
thematic lines of the volume and presenting its contribution