IMMIGRATION MOVES FRONT AND CENTER IN ITALY’S LOCAL ELECTIONS

COMO, Italy — The center-right candidate for mayor of Como, Mario Landriscina, a doctor who once did United Nations relief work, says that Italy is second to none in rescuing migrants and that rejecting refugees or minors is out of the question.

But, he insists, the time has come to remove the migrants who blight his handsome and orderly town, where they sleep in abandoned garages or loiter on the esplanade around Lake Como, better known as a luxury destination for George Clooney than as a magnet for despair.

“See there?” he asked, pointing to an African man sitting alone on a piazza’s steps the other day as Mr. Landriscina strolled toward the cathedral for a mayoral endorsement by some of Italy’s leading right-wing politicians. “That’s the first guy. It’s only the beginning.”

Italians vote on Sunday in the final round of municipal elections seen as a bellwether before national elections, and immigration is the issue that may determine races from this northern city on the Swiss border to the southern coast of Sicily.

Italy has registered more than 70,000 migrants this year, 27 percent more than it did by this time in 2016, when a record 181,000 migrants arrived.

Shoving has broken out in Parliament over the center-left government’s proposal to extend citizenship to the children of migrants born on Italian soil.

All over, parties and politicians are shifting to a tougher stance.

After the first round of voting on June 11 delivered a setback to the surging anti-establishment Five Star Movement, it adopted a notably harder line on immigration. One of its highest-profile politicians, Rome’s embattled mayor, Virginia Raggi, called for a moratorium on new immigrants.

Champions of a more welcoming approach to immigrants have not fared well.

In Lampedusa, the Sicilian island that became the emblem of Italy’s immigration issue after years of inundation by desperate migrants, the Democratic Party mayor had become an international symbol of Italy’s open arms. She failed even to make it to Sunday’s runoff.

Here in Como, Sunday’s election could well be determined by the debate over what to do with the hundreds of African migrants hoping to go north to Switzerland or Northern Europe for jobs.

As seaplanes glided to dock and women in sun hats sipped aperitifs, scores of African migrants gathered, looking at the verdant mountains standing guard between the placid lake and Switzerland.

“I can’t go anywhere,” said Fofana Abdoulaye, a 31-year-old migrant from the Ivory Coast, as he stood in the shadow of the city’s landmark Volta Temple.

While he and other migrants spoke of their appreciation of Italy’s humanitarian efforts to save them from the Mediterranean Sea, they also expressed exhaustion with the country’s intricate web of permits and papers and European agreements that required them to stay in the country that first documented them.

But locals, too, were exasperated.

It’s a horrible calling card for the city,” Enrica Tattamanti, 65, said as she watched her granddaughter, Benedetta, play next to Lake Como.

She worried that funds redirected to migrants deprived the town’s handicapped citizens of services and complained that any protest prompted accusations of racism. “I hope the center right wins,” she said.

Its candidate, Mr. Landriscina, argues for closing migrant reception centers and removing the migrants who he argued did not want to be here to begin with, to relieve mounting tension between Como’s locals and immigrants who he said made no effort to integrate.

“It’s a problem where the conflict — a little bit ethnic, a little bit religious — risks creating tension,” said Mr. Landriscina, who just finished a book about Rudolph W. Giuliani’s time as mayor of New York.

If elected, he said, he would go to Rome, which has jurisdiction over such issues, and appeal for a change.

Mr. Landriscina arrived for the endorsement event at the Broletto, a medieval and elegantly arched building next to the cathedral, to the cheers of familiar right-wing politicians including Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the law-and-order Brothers of Italy party.

At the event, Ms. Meloni, a member of Parliament, wasted no time bringing up her party’s opposition to the government’s proposal to extend citizenship to children born in Italy.

“We believe Italian citizenship cannot be a concession or automatic,” she said to applause. “They must earn it, ask it, and citizenship should be celebrated.”

In an interview after the event, Ms. Meloni mocked the Five Star Movement for its belated hard line on immigration, saying it only followed opinion polls and believed in nothing.

This was one of the rare areas where she and the leader of the Democratic Party, former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who considers Italian citizenship a civil right to those born here, agreed.

Of the Five Star Movement’s leader, Beppe Grillo, Mr. Renzi wrote on Facebook: “Grillo got a big slap in the face in the local elections. So what do they invent? A nice attack on immigrants.”

But Ms. Meloni had no problem with attacking the government’s welcoming approach to immigrants. “It devastates the culture, devastates tourism, devastates security, devastates everything,” she said. “Nothing good comes of it. Not even for the immigrants.”

Advocates in Como worry that the adoption of such a hard line in City Hall would only create resentment.

“It’s a losing strategy,” said the Rev. Giusto Della Valle, a priest who since 2011 has run a center on the outskirts of town where more than 50 migrants sleep at night.

In the dining room where immigrants prepare and eat their dinners, he proudly pointed out the soccer trophy the refugees he hosts won in a tournament for National Refugee Day this month.

He then gave a tour of the center, showing the room where a woman and her two small children had slept the previous night and in which 24 teenagers had slept until May.

A learning center with outdated computers, the locker room with the locker doors warped from break-ins. He walked up the stairs and came upon three Nigerian women in the lobby.

“After school I can find a job in a restaurant,” Sandra Obodo, 26, said as one friend braided her hair and another slept, recovering from a collapse brought on by stress.

Ms. Obodo said she had crossed over from Libya nine months ago after escaping retribution murders at home. While her ship had made it to shore after a rough journey, she said, migrants on a boat that departed at the same time had been lost at sea. “It’s not easy,” she said.

Father Della Valle said Nigerian traffickers, headquartered nearby in Turin, promised many of the women jobs but then put them to work as prostitutes. He has kicked out of his center pimps who tried to recruit the women, but he said the local police cared only about potential radicals.

The current center-left government had also struck down his proposals to turn abandoned buildings into more dignified centers, he added. (The center-left candidate in Como, Maurizio Traglio, declined to comment.)

The issues roiling Italy touched many of the people in the center personally. In a small courtyard, Muhamed Delah Abillah, 31, spoke of his family’s long search for work and stability since coming from Afghanistan more than a decade ago.

His oldest child, Marzia, 8, was born in Italy, he said. “She has an Italian name,” he said as she read an Italian magazine and chatted with her siblings in Italian. 

“We want her to be Italian.”