Practices and rhetoric of migrants’ social exclusion in Italy: intermarriage, work and citizenship as devices for the production of social inequalities

Abstract

The article aims to investigate the intersection of legislative dimensions, economic conditions and intimate life contributing to racialising and marginalising the poorest non-European migrants. First, this article focuses on the central role played by the private life in claiming citizenship rights and in building a sense of belonging within migratory contexts. As a result, mixed couples become a border zone through which the state disciplines immigrants according to their class, nationality and gender. On the other side, mixed couples and their intimate lives define resistance against the state’s biopolitical power to control people and become the space of intimate citizenship. Second, the article analyses the matrix for immigrants’ exclusion and differentiation embodied within the institutional and legislative system through immigration and citizenship laws. Therefore, the ‘coloniality power matrix’ becomes an active component of the naturalisation system of social differences at an institutional level.

Keywords:

• migration
• intermarriage
• intimate citizenship
• governmentality
• intersectionality
• Italy

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the editors of the special issue, the Editor and Associate Editor of the Journal and the reviewers for comments that allowed me to think more deeply about some of the issues and to explore other topics that have enriched the essay.

Notes

1. The ethnographic data presented in this article are part of a long-term research project carried out with mixed Italian–Moroccan couples; this ongoing research started in 2001 and is being conducted in the geographical area of Rome and Southern Italy. The research adopts an approach that intersects the dimension from the bottom, the practices and representations that occur in everyday life, with that of the high, institutional policies and strategies related to family control and disciplining of migrants by the State. During the research, the family biographies of 40 Italian–Moroccan couples were reconstructed from separate interviews with the partners (80 interviews). Where possible, parents were also interviewed (20 interviews). In total, 100 interviews, as well as numerous informal conversations and field notes, were carried out.

2. This percentage has increased from 4.8% in 1995 to 12.3% in 2004 and to 13% in 2011 (Colomba 2010, ISTAT data).

3. ISTAT data: http://www.istat.it/it/archivio/75517

4. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the possibility of regularising the status of migrants was quite easy. See, e.g., the Acts of the Ministry of Labour of 26.1.65, 19.8.72, 25.1.73, 21.5.79, 141/19/80.

5. The immigration act of 1998 (No. 40), paragraph 1, article 1, states that the law applies ‘(…) to citizens of non-EU states and stateless persons, hereinafter designated as foreigners’.

6. In April 2014, this clause was repealed by the parliament.

7. The Supreme Court has ruled on the basis of the appeal submitted by an Italian–Moroccan couple who were not allowed to marry as a result of the 2009 law. Judgment of the Constitutional Court no. 245 of 25 July 2011.

8. The judgment is available for consultation at http://www.giurcost.org/decisioni/2011/0245s-11.html

9. In 2008, 63% of citizenships were granted as a result of marriage (Source: Ministry of the Interior, Department for Civil Liberties and Immigration). There are a greater number of Moroccan women applying for Italian citizenship (Conti and Strozza 2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rosa Parisi

ROSA PARISI is Lecturer of European Ethnology at Department of Humanities, Foggia University.