Mesolcina and Calanca: new procedure for residence permits

As of today, Tuesday, a new procedure is in force in Mesolcina and Calanca for issuing residence permits: anyone applying for an L, B or G permit must produce a criminal record extract. The measure comes almost six months after the arrest of four foreigners living in Roveredo, as part of an international operation against organized crime.

The Rhaetian Migration Office explains that there is no one-size-fits-all answer: each application is assessed individually. To deny a permit, it must be shown that the person represents a current danger to security and public order. What matters most is the nature and severity of the offences committed, along with the likelihood of further offences in pending criminal proceedings, that is, in the absence of a final conviction. Proving the existence of real threats remains difficult, especially when the facts are not yet fully established. For the canton, the new procedure means more administrative work and possible delays in issuing permits, not only in Mesolcina but across the whole of Graubünden.

Roveredo disagrees

Roveredo's deputy mayor, Decio Cavallini, does not expect extra work for municipal staff. In his view, municipalities are becoming actively involved in the preliminary check, filling out a standardized form with their assessment of the applicant — a task that, he says, is already largely part of the administrative practice followed when someone applies for residency in a municipality.

Cavallini also disputes the scope of the measure, which applies only to Mesolcina and Calanca. In his view it should be extended to the whole canton, since the office responsible for permits is cantonal. Otherwise, it would remain possible to obtain a permit without checks in another region, for example in Chur, and then move down to Mesolcina. That is what happened in 2021 with a 53-year-old man from Campania, who lived in Roveredo with a B permit and was arrested in France at the end of February, at a time when no criminal record checks were yet applied in Graubünden. Back then, a simple online search would have been enough to find his previous convictions. That is why Google is now also among the tools available to municipalities, which the Roveredo administration intends to use right away, according to Cavallini, without this amounting to an excessive workload.

The new rules add to the self-declaration on pending criminal proceedings and prior convictions, introduced canton-wide last May for people applying for a residence permit. According to the Migration Office, no residence permit has so far been denied on the basis of information provided in the self-declaration. That is a finding which, according to anti-mafia experts who have analysed the government's measures, invites some reflection: the new rules are an important signal, but mafia networks could dodge them fairly easily by relying on a wide network of associates with clean criminal records.