The shifting boundaries of (un)documentedness: a gendered understanding of migrants’ employment-based legalization pathways in Italy

ABSTRACT

The paper provides a qualitative exploration of the experiences of migrants who have engaged in the last employment-based amnesties in Italy. To cross the illegal/legal divide migrants have to successfully perform societal expectations in terms of more or less deserving kinds of work embedded in legalization measures. The moral economy of domestic work favours the creation of employer–employee relationships, which – while sometimes highly exploitative – are more frequently capitalized for legalization purposes. Male workers have been instead disadvantaged by the frequent lack of long-term, dependent work positions and by policies’ favourable stance towards domestic work. However, migrants actively challenge marginalization manoeuvring their work identities through a varied network of intermediaries to exploit the greater legitimization of domestic work in a context marked by compliance and weak gatekeeping. The paper contributes to the literature on irregularity showing how work-related legalization processes are achieved and the role gender plays in this process.

KEYWORDS:

• Undocumented migration
• gender and immigration policies
• care and domestic work
• work-based legalization
• Italy
• Southern Europe

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Strategies range from collecting “documentary proofs” to the “moulding” (Anderson 2010) of work careers for legalization purposes, to the “strategic production of fog” (Broeders and Engbersen 2007) and “identity stripping” (Ellermann 2010).

2 Italian detections of illegal stays regarded for over the ninety per cent, migrant men (European Migration Network 2012).

3 Success rates were around the ninety-four per cent in the period 1982–2002, seventy-five per cent in 2009. Ministry’s provisionary data (dating back to April 2013) state that over one third of the applications had been rejected in 2012. According to Minister Ricciardi, this was due to excessive administrative rigidity (Il Sole 24 Ore, 19 April 2013: “Immigrants: a failed amnesty. One third of the applications rejected”).

4 Also reflected in entry quota decree flows policy from 2005 onwards (Salis 2012).

5 Quite often, workers lost regularization chances because employers did not meet some of the requirements; in other cases, employers pretended to apply providing workers with fake receipts.

6 Data provided by the Ministry of Interiors are available at this address: http://www1.interno.gov.it/mininterno/export/sites/default/it/sezioni/sala_stampa/speciali/emersione_irregolare_2012/dati_domade_ricevute.html.

7 Domestic workers had to be hired for at least twenty hours for a single employer and could not “match” the hours worked for several employers.

8 The exclusion of women from the black market of work contracts is confirmed by research carried out with swindled migrants: over 438 migrants interviewed in Milan, almost all of them were males (NAGA 2011).

9 The case of Brescia may be seen as the exception confirming the rule. After charges of corruption had been held towards Immigration Officers in relation to the management of the 2009 amnesty, officials had taken an especially restrictive stance in 2012, which resulted in an especially high rate of refused applications (eighty per cent against an Italian average of thirty per cent, see http://www.meltingpot.org/L-anomalia-Brescia-intervista-all-Avv-Manlio-Vicini-Ass-ne.html#.Vg1fneyvHcs). This actually seems to confirm the “compliant” attitude of most local Immigration Offices.

10 It is a measure issued by the Prefect ordering the migrant found in a position of irregularity to leave the Italian territory within fifteen days.

11 While in 2012 only the migrants who had received expulsion orders for reasons strictly related to security and public order issues (i.e. those provisioned for terrorism or to migrants condemned for especially serious kinds of crimes) were prevented from applying, in 2009 even those having not followed a previous expulsion order – namely migrants who had been checked for the second time without papers – could not apply. Just two years after the amnesty had been officially closed, the Ministry of Interiors (through the Circular n. 17102, 23 June 2011) established that applications regarding migrants affected by these “double expulsion orders” could be positively processed (however, just after a specific request had been put forward by the employer).