“The eternal return” of normality: Invisibility and essentiality of migrant farmworkers before and during the Covid-19 pandemic

Among the factors that the Covid-19 Pandemic has brought to light, the link between international mobility, migration policies and economic nationalism is central. Drawing on ethnographic data collected during and after the lockdown, the article focuses on the real motivations behind the amnesty approved last year by the government as part of the Decreto Relaunch, and aimed at regularising undocumented migrant workers employed in those sectors of the labour market considered essential (agriculture, domestic and care). Through the categories of essentiality and invisibility, the contribution investigates the ambivalent role played by migrants within the labour market and the national economy, paying particular attention to the agro-food sector. Above all, it focuses on the paradoxes made explicit by the measure: whose numbers, especially in the agricultural sector, demonstrate its ineffectiveness. This article aims to show how, in the face of the essentiality and numerical centrality of the migrant labour force within the agri-food sector, the national economic policy still does not recognise its importance, encouraging exploitative practices and policies of socio-economic marginalisation.Tra i fattori che la Pandemia da Covid-19 ha fatto emergere risulta centrale il nesso tra la mobilità internazionale, le politiche migratorie e il nazionalismo economico. A partire da alcune risultanze etnografiche, raccolte durante e dopo il confinamento, l’articolo si concentra sulle reali motivazioni alla base della Sanatoria varata l’anno scorso dal governo all’interno del Decreto Rilancio, e finalizzata alla regolarizzazione dei lavoratori e delle lavoratrici migranti impiegati all’interno di quei settori del mercato del lavoro considerati essenziali (agricolo, domestico e di cura). Attraverso le categorie di essenzialità e invisibilità, il contributo indaga quindi il ruolo ambivalente che le persone migranti giocano all’interno del mercato del lavoro e dell’economia nazionale, con particolare riferimento al settore agroalimentare. Ma soprattutto esso mette a fuoco i paradossi di questa misura di regolarizzazione, le cui cifre, soprattutto nel settore agricolo, ne dimostrano tutta l’inefficacia. L’obiettivo di questo articolo è infatti quello di mostrare come a fronte dell’essenzialità e della centralità numerica della forza lavoro migrante all’interno del settore agroalimentare, la politica economica nazionale continua a non riconoscerne l’importanza, incentivando al contrario pratiche di sfruttamento e politiche di marginalizzazione socio-economica

The prism of new mobilities. The mobility trajectories of refugees and asylum seekers outside the Italian reception system

For over twenty years, Italy has faced the phenomenon of so-called “forced” international migrations. By virtue of its geographic position in the Mediterranean, this country constitutes, in many cases, the first landing and the transit country for asylum seekers in their flight from wars, political crises, environmental catastrophes and depletion of resources. This also implied a growing number of “rejections” that is, asylum seekers to whom no form of protection was grantedand are unlikely to return to their country of origin. A segment of them represents an intense geographic mobility or, better to say, multiple mobilities that intersect and fuel each other.Scholars have mostly explored the trajectories of mobility of the native people or so-called “economic migrants”. Much more rarely, refugees and asylum seekers have been perceived and framed as mobile subjects, protagonists of multiple and plural geographic, social, and migration movements.Therefore, this editorial and the whole Special Issue focus on the social changes that are reshaping migration scenarios, with particular attention paid to the paths of international and national mobility of refugees and asylum seekers outside the reception system, as well as their geographical, social and migration trajectories.Specifically, after introducing the topic, this paper, on the one hand, reconstructs the framework of Italian asylum policies, progressively more restrictive and discriminatory and destined to become a model for the entire European Union, analyzing the impact of the legal system and migration policies on the construction of the material and labor vulnerability of migrants and their exploitation within the national labor market. On the other hand, it deepens and reconstructs the theoretical perspectives on the phenomenon of mobility, the intersection between spatial dimension and temporal dimensions. Particular attention is paid to the pandemic and to the sociological interpretations of this phenomenon, the “mirror function” that it performs within society and the global migration scenario, the instrumental uses that have been made of this crisis in the political, economic, legal and social fields and the impact it has had on the common ethnographic and research practices shared by the papers that make up the Special Issue. Finally, the Editorial present the structure of the Special Issue and the contents of the articles, organized according to coherent theoretical and empirical path, aimed at illuminating all the facets of the “prism of new mobility”

Stuck and Exploited. Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Italy Between Exclusion, Discrimination and Struggles

This volume analyses exclusion processes, segregation dynamics and the forms of discrimination of refugees and asylum seekers in Italy, where the reception system is marked by opaqueness and arbitrariness and is becoming increasingly similar to the model of “camps”. The numerous vibrant contributions present a fully-fledged system of inferiorization, characterised by labour exploitation, housing discomfort, meagre rights and control strategies, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led to a sharp worsening of the health, work, housing and administrative conditions. A framework that has found opposition in the daily resistance and in the struggles of asylum seekers

Stuck and Exploited. Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Italy between Exclusion, Discrimination and Struggles

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

»Dvojno izredno stanje« in sekuritizacija humanitarnega pristopa k italijanskemu sistemu sprejemanja med pandemijo

The Coronavirus outbreak has revealed the critical situation that can emerge when isolation and quarantine measures are applied to migrants living in reception and detention centers and overcrowded contexts. The paper focuses on events that affected two Extraordinary Reception Centres (CASs) and a Hotspot, located in Northern and Southern Italy. Although the humanitarian paradigm still represents the most functional form of government, this historical moment’s particularity led the authors to reflect on the continuity and change it brings. They hypothesize that the health crisis has downsized the action of care within humanitarian spaces favoring the strengthening of traditional securitarian solutions.Izbruh koronavirusa je razkril kritičen položaj, do katerega lahko privedejo izolacijski in karantenski ukrepi, uporabljeni na migrantih, ki živijo v prenatrpanih sprejemnih centrih in centrih za pridržanje. Članek obravnava dogajanje v dveh izrednih sprejem­nih centrih (CASs) in v tako imenovanem hotspotu, ki se nahajajo na severu oziroma jugu Italije. Čeprav je humanitarna paradigma še vedno najbolj funkcionalna oblika upravljanja, je posebnost tega zgodovinskega trenutka avtorja spodbudila k razmisleku o kontinuiteti in spremembah, ki jih prinaša. Po njunem mnenju je zdravstvena kriza prispevala h krčenju oskrbe v humanitarnih okoljih na račun krepitve tradicionalnih sekuritarnih rešitev

The multiple facets of (im)mobility. A multisited ethnography on territorialisation experiences and mobility trajectories of asylum seekers and refugees outside the Italian reception system

The article analyses the forms of mobility and (im)mobility of migrants and asylum seekers who are outside the institutional reception system. Through the narration of two ethnographic cases placed in northern and southern Italy, the authors retrace the biographical and geographic trajectories of migrants, and compare them with territorial policies. By analysing two very different contexts from the economic and social point of view, we highlight the similarities between these territories, the mobility and immobility they generate and through which they are crossed, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic

The embodiment of fear: Reproductive health and migrant women’s choices, in Verona, Italy

This article discusses the results of ethnographic research conducted in the municipality of Verona (Veneto Region, Northeast Italy), during 2018, aimed at analysing the re- productive health needs of migrant women, and their access to such services in the territory. The research highlighted that, in addition to many critical structural- organizational issues, there was an emotional obstacle to the use of services – that is, the feeling of fear. In this paper, therefore, we will try to reflect on the role exercised by fear in the relationship between migrant women and reproductive health services. We interpret this emotion not as the expression of an individual experience and feeling, but rather as an example of “embedded thinking”; the result of a social construction that reflects dynamics and power relationships, capable of transforming feelings into practices

Finding New Ways for Refugees and Asylum Seekers’ Inclusion. A Reflexive Analysis of Practices Developed by the Third Sector and Civil Society in Trentino

This essay aims at analysing the role played by civil society organisations in refugees’ social and labour inclusion, highlighting the assumptions that drive their ac- tion and the challenges they are facing in the light of the recent political changes in the Italian scenario. The social realities investigated spare no effort for migrants’ integration, sometimes finding solutions beyond the reception system. In this paper, we discuss their practices, analysing the borders (juridical, political, territorial, corporative, social, insti- tutional, symbolic) they act and react, reflecting also on the assumptions that drive their actions, and crossing them with migrants’ assumptions and biographical trajectories, to explore how they intersect, impacting on their migration and integration paths