Combining Civic Stratification and Transnational Approaches for Reunited Families: The Case of Moroccans, Indians and Pakistanis in Reggio Emilia

Abstract

How migrant families are put together and the forms they take varies with the cultural\ud and social origins, though also with the family’s migratory strategy, the sociocultural\ud context of the host country and the latter’s chosen migration policy. Exploratory\ud fieldwork in an Italian area led us to adopt a combined analytical framework in\ud studying such families, bearing in mind both the theory of civic stratification and the\ud transnational perspective of migratory processes. In the first part of the article, we shall\ud explore certain implications of transnationalism and conclude that reunited families are\ud intrinsically transnational. In the second part, we shall apply the concept of civic\ud stratification to the study of family reunification. A third section will analyse some of\ud the results of our fieldwork, on which to validate the combined analytical approach. Our\ud contention is that a transnational perspective and civic stratification can be usefully\ud integrated and provide a new interpretive key to various aspects of family reunification

Unemployed Migrants Coping with the Economic Crisis. Romanians and Moroccans in Italy

“…He arrives as a single man, and after a few years, he marries a Moroccan woman on one of his home visits (Lievens 1999), thus reunifying the family (Bertolani et al 2014). For the Romanians, unlike other Romanian migratory flows (Stanek 2009), there is no dominant migration pattern towards Italy: women and men of any marital status may be among the first migrants, but they often include married adults with children who rejoin the rest of their family as soon as they can.…”

Bodies at Work, Work on Bodies: Migrant Bodies, Wage Labour, and Family Reunification in Italy

“…The intersections of these parameters and the 'ethnonational' segmentation of labour (Fullin and Reyneri 2011) and housing market structure the right to family life along national, ethnic, gender, and class lines. Lydia Morris (2003) and other authors (Bertolani et al 2013;Bonizzoni 2012;Kraler 2010;Schweitzer 2015) use the lens of civic stratification (Lockwood 1996) to study reunited migrant families and the family reunification process. In fact, the different types of applicant's residence permit (for family reasons, for waged work, for self-employment, for seasonal work, for study, for political asylum or the EC residence permit for longterm residents) and the different periods for which they are valid (from some months to indefinitive leave to remain) contribute to the heterogeneous systems of opportunity for family reunification.…”

Transnational Families and Migrant Masculinities: The Social Institution of Male Adulthood and Family Reunification in the Bangladeshi Diaspora in Italy

“…At the same time, the growing number of contributions on men's studies that have helped launch new research areas and create a "new intellectual program" (Carrigan et al 1985;Connell 1996;Hearn 2015;Kimmel et al 2005) only rarely focus on migrants and, if they do, focus primarily on the working dimension (Batnizky et al 2009;Shereen et al, 2014;Donaldson et al 2009), only superficially addressing other aspects of male experience such as family and private life (Bustamante, Alemàn 2007;Parreñas 2008). At the same time, research that focuses on family reunification (Bertolani et al 2014;Kofman 2014) is quite rarely examined from a male point of view -even if recent works have also addressed male migration through a different epistemological approach as well as a gendered perspective (Batnitzky et al 2009;Broughton 2008;Bustamante, Alemàn 2007;Della Puppa 2014;2019b;Gallo and Scrinzi 2016;McKay 2007;Näre 2010;Parreñas 2008;Sarti 2010;Saucedo, Morales 2010;Scrinzi 2010).…”