A security Problem or a Matter of Welfare? Immigration in Italy and the Pacchetto Sicurezza

This is only part of the introduction. The abstract will be available soon.

In this work I will try to focus on migration as a human experience rather than as a threat to the stability of the nation-state, suggesting that a different managing of migration flows could be pragmatically useful, above all in the case of Italy, where on July the 2nd 2009 a security law, the 733-B included in the pacchetto sicurezza , has been approved, that poses several further restrictions to the life of immigrants. For this purpose, I have interviewed a few people, so that I could be able to tell immigration from the immigrants’ perspective, since I have found that most of the literature about Italian immigration describes this phenomenon as an inward movement affecting a previous national equilibrium, rather than the reverse: an outward movement of people coming and interacting with a different environment. Besides, I must remark that I have found a lack in the literature in Italian, as there are almost no core works available that did not treat the issue of immigration as a legal controversy (see Sicurezza e Immigrazione by Salvatore Cetonze and Immigrazione e Diritti Fondamentali by Gianluca Bascherini ) and many other essays concentrate on Italy as a country of emigration, and they only touch the problem of immigrants’ life superficially.
People I have interviewed are representative of the most numerous nationalities residing in Italy according to the data of the ISTAT and of the report of the NGOs Caritas and Migrantes : in order Romania, Albania, Morocco, China and Ukraine. I have asked them several questions to understand what are their ideas about issues of migration in general and, more specifically, about the way the Italian government treats the matter. Even though much of the information gained during the interviews may be biased by political ideas and it may sound however not ‘scientific’, I believe that one can often learn more by talking to people than by reading from books. That is one of the main reasons why I have decided to give voice to the people that are the object of my dissertation, as I found that not necessarily information acquired from surveys, statistics and theoretical essays would be just in expressing the problems raised by the human experience of migration.
I decided to define my topic without necessarily choosing the type of migration I wanted to talk about. As it comes out of a classification made by Colombo and Sciortino , in fact, immigrants in Italy and in the world are of several different types, according to the reason because of which they came, to their standing in front of the law, to their conditions of life. One of the methodological problems at the beginning was that there are theoretical and, to some extent, practical differences among different types of migrants: whether they move as asylum-seekers or as economic migrants, for example, and whether they already constitute a minority in the country they moved to, or whether they have just arrived. What I found out while researching is that such differences are not as relevant as the fact that they seem to exist as to justify a difference in treatment, and even more significantly, that they tend to be blurred not only in the literature, but also in the very practice. How is it to be defined who is an asylum seeker and who is an economic migrant? Asylum seekers turn out to be economic migrants as soon as they find a job and settle down, improving their standard of life. Economic migrants, even if not looking for asylum in principle, are still ideally moving from a condition in which they found their rights less granted, to one in which they hope to fulfill their expectations about being granted further possibilities to improve their lives. Furthermore, if one takes the example of North-Korean immigrants flowing to China and being sent back with the label of ‘economic migrants’, one grasps how so many of these definitions are not to be given a priori, as they are rather an instrument for governments to divide and conceptualize the Other outside their borders according to their own assumed security needs. It must also be remarked that the distinction often made in the literature between legal and illegal migrants portraits a behavior of governments toward the phenomenon of migration, but it fails to portrait realistically the situation of migrants all over the world.
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