Encounters with the clandestino/a and the nomad: the emplaced and embodied constitution of non-citizenship

Abstract

Taking the ‘encounter’ as an analytic, this paper will argue for an understanding of citizenship as an emergent condition that is emplaced and embodied, rather than as simply a collection of rights to be possessed or endowed. This is not to deny the importance of legal status to the ways in which one inhabits the city (and therefore the nation-state), but show how this status is modulated in the everyday to constitute a range of legitimately and illegitimately present non-citizen subjects. The nature of the encounter as a constitutive event in which particular bodies are deemed in- or out-of-place will be discussed relative to two imagined figures that have been used to represent outsiders that are deemed to be illegitimately present in Italy: the clandestino/a and the nomad. These figures have been invoked in legislation and in political and popular discourse. In this paper, they are also imagined to be encountered in the spaces of the city.

Keywords::

• citizenship
• irregularisation
• illegitimate outsider

Notes

^1. Names have been changed to protect anonymity.

^2. A detailed discussion of the ‘Nomad Emergency Decree’ and the ways in which it built on the racialisation of the ‘nomad’ in Italian law are beyond the scope of this paper, and are discussed in detail elsewhere, see Hepworth (2012a). As I discuss there, the ‘nomad emergency decree’ was the culmination of progressive campaigns and policies that constituted the Roma as a public security threat. The rhetorical declaration of a nomad or gypsy ‘emergency’ first emerged in Rutelli's 2001 campaign for the national leadership. However, it was not until Veltroni's 2007 national leadership campaign that ‘gypsies’ and ‘nomads’ went from being a fundamentally localproblem to become a national emergency. This escalation followed the violent, mortal attack on an Italian woman on the outskirts of Rome by a Romanian Roma man.

^3. This research draws on a growing body of literature that highlights the variety of permutations of irregularity/regularity and illegitimacy/legitimacy that together form a topology of insider–outsider positions at the boundaries of citizenship. E.g., Nyers (2003), Mezzadra and Neilson (2008), Peutz (2010) and Nyers (2010).

^4. The ‘crime of clandestinity was overturned by the European Court in April 2011. However, given this paper's focus on the symbolic role of the legislation in processes of criminalization, I have elected not to focus on the juridical arguments that accompanied this decision.

^5. Deportation does not necessarily follow automatically from having been identified as undocumented and then detained. On being identified by the police as undocumented, migrants are typically taken to the central police station for identification. The first time that an individual is apprehended by the police for being undocumented, they are issued with expulsion papers, which specify that the individual is to leave Italy within 5 days, and is forbidden from re-entering Italy for 5 years. Under the Bossi-Fini, those migrants found in Italy after the expiration of the terms of their expulsion order can be incarcerated for up to 5 years, with the length of incarceration increasing each time an individual is picked up by the police and charged with non-compliance with the initial magistrate's order (the expulsion papers).

^6. These inadequacies were established through two successive migration legislations: the so-called Turco-Napoletano and the Bossi-Fini, which were implemented in 1998 and 2002, respectively. For a detailed discussion of these legislations, see: Calavita (2005b), Colombo and Sciortino (2003), Fasani (2010) and Savio (2009).

^7. The amnesty that followed the ‘crime of clandestinity’ is not the first time that special consideration has been given to domestic workers under Italian migration law. It has precedents in the dedicated quota for domestic workers in each decreto flussi, as well as in the amnesty that followed the introduction of the Bossi-Fini legislation.

^8. For a detailed discussion of these legislations, see Hepworth (2012a).