“Illegal” immigrants are universally demonized, but it is exclusionary immigration laws that produce “illegality.”
Illiberal immigration policies and the xenophobic rhetoric that accompanies them are on the rise in the Western world. In Trump’s America, children are being prised away from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, making even the President’s Republican colleagues express discomfort. In the U.K., the unlawful detention and deportation of British-Caribbean citizens – the so-called “Windrush scandal” – has revealed the deeply pernicious consequences of Theresa May’s “hostile environment” policy for migrants. In mainland Europe, meanwhile, the anti-immigrant nationalist leader Victor Orban achieved a resounding victory in the Hungarian national election in April, while in Italy the formation of a new coalition government has catapulted the anti-immigrant Lega (League) party into the heart of political power. The appointment of Matteo Salvini, the Lega’s leader, as Interior Minister means that a far-right politician is now in charge of Italy’s border control, its policing, and its immigration policy. This has rightly caused alarm: during the recent election campaign, Salvini pledged to deport hundreds of thousands of “illegal” migrants should his party win, and this rhetoric has continued following the Lega’s positive election results. Just weeks after coming into office, the newly appointed minister left 629 migrants stranded when he refused to allow a rescue ship to dock in Italy.
Politicians such as Salvini and Trump revel in whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment with a dramatic focus on the supposed threats to nation-states’ borders, but as my book Rules, Paper, Status shows, they consistently overlook a crucial part of the immigration picture: “illegal” immigration is actually produced inside borders through the implementation of harsh and exclusionary policies that create the very categories which parties like the Lega then rail against. As migration scholars have consistently pointed out, “illegal” immigrants are not merely comprised of those who arrive on the rickety boats that cross the Mediterranean. In fact, the number of migrants who attempt to arrive in Europe “clandestinely” makes up only a tiny fraction of the continent’s migrant population. Many more arrive “legally” on some kind of visa for tourism, work, study, or family purposes.
Rules, Paper, Status shows that among this much larger group of migrants, it is not borders per se that make them “illegal,” but rather the ways in which immigration law operates inside these borders. According to current Italian immigration law that was created by Umberto Bossi (a former leader of the of the Lega, then known as the Lega Nord) and Gianfranco Fini in 2002, a migrant’s legal status in the country is dependent upon having employment. This means that regardless of how many years an individual has lived in the country, the loss of a job or employment in the “black market” can also result in the loss of legal status.
As I discovered in the course of my research, when legal status is contingent upon employment, many migrants lose their right to remain in the country. Indeed, it is common for recently-arrived migrants, those who are long settled, and even some who have been born in Italy to fall into “illegality” at some point in their lives. This was the case for Rashid, a Pakistani man I encountered who had lived in the country for over twenty years but was unable to renew his permit after losing his job in an engineering factory during the global financial crisis. Unable to find another position, he slipped into “illegality” even though he regarded Italy as his home. In other cases, children who had lived in the country for most of their lives suddenly discovered that they had become “illegal” when they could not find employment immediately after leaving high school.
Rules, Paper, Status argues that successfully navigating Italian immigration bureaucracy requires and induces culturally specific modes of behavior. Yet exclusionary immigration laws can transform this social and cultural learning into the very thing that endangers migrants’ right to live in the country. The paradox in such cases is that it is often the most socially and culturally “integrated” individuals – including those from the second generation – who find themselves running afoul of the system. In their determination to maintain migrants as socially, economically, and legally marginalized, the defenders of these policies reproduce an inherent disconnect between lived experience and legal status. They ensure that Italy has an “illegal” migration problem.
The number of migrants who attempt to arrive in Europe “clandestinely” makes up only a tiny fraction of the continent’s migrant population. Many more arrive “legally” on some kind of visa for tourism, work, study, or family purposes.
Politicians such as Salvini claim that “illegality” is embodied by those clandestinely crossing borders. But as the case of Rashid and others like him show, “illegal” and “legal” statuses are the product of immigration policies that impose these categories on people. The U.K.’s Windrush Scandal and DACA (Deferred Act for Childhood Arrivals) in the U.S. are cases in point. Changes to immigration and citizenship laws in the U.K. meant that members of the Windrush generation – migrants who were invited to the U.K. between 1948 and 1971 to meet post-war labor demands – came to hold undefined legal statuses. When the government tightened its controls on “immigration,” this resulted in some individuals being wrongly refused essential services such as health care, while others were detained and even deported. The case of DACA in the U.S. shows how strict categories such as “citizen” or “illegal alien” frequently contradict people’s lived experiences: a baby born on U.S. soil is considered an American citizen, but one who arrives in the country as a one-month-old is not. The arbitrary and constructed nature of these categories is particularly apparent in Italy, where it is common for people to pass in and out of “legal” and “illegal” statuses, and where migrants must frequently engage in semi-legal practices in order to abide by official rules.
The way to tackle “illegal” immigration is not by strengthening borders or deporting migrants, but by reforming immigration policy.
While politicians and the media focus on borders and the spectacles that unfold around them, attention must likewise be directed at the internal legal and administrative borders within nation-states where “legality” and “illegality” are also produced and experienced. The way to tackle “illegal” immigration is not by strengthening borders or deporting migrants, but by reforming immigration policy. Italy’s so-called problem with migration lies not in those who come to live and work in the country, but rather in the terms in which they are forced to do so. For too long, Italian politicians have been happy to make use of migrants for their labor but unwilling to grant them the right to become citizens. This dysfunctional state of affairs, which is rooted fundamentally in a refusal to accept that Italy is now a multicultural society, means that those who become cultural insiders are forced to remain as structural outsiders.
While alarmed by Salvini’s proclamations, migration experts and humanitarian groups have also shown that his plans are completely unfeasible: Italy simply cannot afford to pay for the deportation of 500,000 people. Yet whether or not his proposals are realized, the anti-immigrant rhetoric which dominates contemporary public debates in Italy works to restrict discussions on immigration to alarmist claims about the perceived need to control borders through emergency solutions. Progressives in the country must change the terms of this debate, so that the potential for meaningful social and legal inclusion becomes a viable political project.
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Posted by: Malik | July 16, 2018 at 11:59 AM
Must say that the migration theme is quite painful for all Europe. No matter what politics say it would always be a problem.
Posted by: neve | July 11, 2018 at 07:40 AM