Surviving underground: Irregular migrants, Italian families, invisible welfare

Abstract

Ambrosini M. Surviving underground: irregular migrants, Italian families, invisible welfare The aim of this article, which focuses on the Italian case and its domestic and care sector, is to highlight two aspects. The first concerns the interaction among unauthorised migrants, the demand of their labour on the one hand and the other social actors they meet during their settling process on the other hand. The second concerns the nature of the irregularity of their condition, which is dynamic and often transient. Despite the increasingly fierce declarations, the reality does not correspond to the claims regarding control of the migration flows. Recognised or disguised forms of tolerance with only occasional implementation of severe measures – such as deportation – and regularisation processes of different kinds and with different purposes seem to be more the rule than the exception in Italy, as in other developed countries.

To work or not to work? Immigrant women and work between constraints and opportunities: a comparison between Lombardy and Cataluña

“…This decision is also consistent with the fact that migrant women have mainly access to low-paid, low-qualified jobs (Morokvasic 1984, Kofman 1999 , Rubin et al 2008, Ambrosini 2012a that are generally concentrated in two sectors: sales and service occupations, and personal services (Rubin et al 2008). Especially the domestic sector is often characterized by informal work (Lutz 80 2008, Ambrosini 2012a, Boccagni and Ambrosini 2012).…”

Rome's ‘legal’ camps for Roma: the construction of new spaces of informality

“…Participation in the informal economy is often a shifting condition affecting all social classes (Williams 2009), although migrants are particularly exposed owing to Italy's restrictive immigration legislation and their concentration in certain sectors (Quassoli 1999;Morris 2001;Reyneri 2004;Merrill 2011). The work of Pietro Saitta (2010Saitta ( , 2011 and Maurizio Ambrosini (2012) indicates that Italy's notoriously labyrinthine bureaucracy -which in many spheres has intensified with neoliberalism and EU integration -serves simultaneously to differentiate rigidly 'insiders' and 'outsiders' and to create spaces of ambiguity in which informal activities are tolerated by the authorities. We can interpret this as a form of governmentality (Foucault 1991) that exerts disciplinary control over migrants, defining and ordering them through bureaucratic procedures, while allowing the maintenance of an exploitative economic system that thrives on the precariousness of those who do not conform bureaucratically.…”

Back to the poorhouse? Social protection and social control of unauthorised immigrants in the shadow of the welfare state

“…In Southern European countries, for example, significant numbers of unauthorised immigrants eventually obtain legal status through regularisation programmes, leading Ambrosini (2012) to describe unauthorised stay as a 'transient condition'. In contexts with a strong penal orientation, such as the (south of the) United States and, less so, the United Kingdom, prevailing poverty issues are less likely to lead to relatively inclusionary arrangements and have a greater potential to result in forms of imprisonment on the basis of immigration status.…”