Culture or taxes? The conceptions of citizenship of migrants and local factory workers in Italy

Abstract

A number of studies of everyday citizenship have shown that the way in which the ordinary population of a state thinks of citizenship is not unilaterally determined by the conceptions present in state's citizenship law. This work looks at what migrants and local factory workers in Ferrara (Northern Italy) think of citizenship, and what conceptions can be found behind their opinions. The research is based on 60 in-depth interviews with migrants of different origins and professions and local factory workers. While scholars consider the Italian citizenship law to be closed towards both the immigrants and those born in Italy from non-citizens, most of the interviewees have expressed the preference for the ius soli and shorter residence requirements. Almost all the interviewees believed that people with a penal record should not be naturalised, and some of the interviewees have expressed cultural conceptions of citizenship that could be demanding of the candidates. However, the stronger consensus was for a lighter, economic conception of the citizen as anyone who works and pays taxes.

Keywords::

• citizenship
• migrants
• workers
• rights
• social construction
• non-citizen

Acknowledgements

The present work is based on part of the data collected for a PhD dissertation at the ‘Doctoral School in Social Sciences: Interactions, Communication, Cultural Constructions’ of the University of Padua. I thank Prof Pier Paolo Giglioli, who was my supervisor during the research, and the anonymous reviewers and the editors of Citizenship Studies for their suggestions.

Notes

^1. The letter of the law defines this kind of naturalization as a concession, making space for strong discretionality, and a number of court judgements have reaffirmed the discretionary nature of the procedure, limiting the possibility of appeal to a court. On the other hand, administrative norms have been implemented in 2007, specifying a clear income requirement and a more ambiguous ‘language and integration’ requirement for the assessment of a naturalization request (see Tintori 2013).

^2. The main difference between the results of the two researches came from the anti-naturalisation minority, as the interviewees in Milan made reference to the alleged delinquency of foreigners and to religious differences when motivating opposition to naturalisations, two argumentations apparently absent from the Berlin research.

^3. All the migrants interviewed had lived in Italy for at least five years, to assure that the possibility of acquiring Italian citizenship was not seen as too remote.

^4. The formulation of the ‘red zone’ concept goes back to Galli et al. (1968); for an English language research see Shin (2001).

^5. Some national differences seem to exist, as the youth interviewed in the UK by Lister et al. (2003) did not seem to show a clear idea of citizenship, while those interviewed in Germany by Miller-Idriss (2009) understood it and were receiving civics classes on the matter. The closest case to a comparative work on the matter is Kourilsky-Augeven, Arutiunyan, and Zdravomyslova (1996), who found more complete understanding of citizenship among French high school students than among Russian ones.

^6. As the sample was neither probabilistic nor representative, here majority and minority do not have a purely arithmetical meaning. Rather, when an aspect is labelled as majoritarian it also means that these answers were given straightforwardly and with similar argumentations from interviewee to interviewee. Minority answers, on the other hand, are offered hesitantly and with argumentations peculiar to a single interviewee.

^7. I focused less in the interviews on the citizenship by marriage, even if the single major modification of the law since 1992 was increasing the requirement from six months to two years in 2009. This was supposedly a measure against marriages of convenience, and surprisingly some of the migrants interviewed were in favour of the measure, despite the clear marginality of the phenomenon. In one case, this was regardless of the norm delaying the naturalisation of an interviewee's spouse by years.

^8. While seeing children as pre-social is a diffuse social norm, this limits children rights as much or more than it defends them, for example see Oakley (1994) and Cohen (2005).

^9. All the names, including the initial of the surname, are pseudonyms.

^10.Badante is the most used term for personal care assistant, although it is sometimes considered derogatory. As others interviewees doing the same job, Iryna T. actually held two MD degrees which were unrecognised by the Italian state. The three years of taxes are a reference to the requirement of presenting the tax forms of the last three years when starting a naturalisation procedure.

^11. The ‘continuous’ residence required by the law is interpreted as the need to exhibit certificates of residence covering the whole period in Italy. Lacking a certificate for even a brief time is treated as if the candidate arrived in Italy only after that moment.

^12. The specific timing of the start of mass immigration in Italy, together perhaps with the particular political culture of Italian trade unions, avoided the ‘trade-union protectionism’ that characterised other countries in other years (for example Avci and McDonald 2000), as the trade unions oriented themselves towards equal rights from the start.

^13. Among the excluded are people in unpaid work or out of work, retired, disabled and children. Class homogeneity in the local group could have limited the diversity of answers, but given the relevance of gender and age for the questions linked the models of citizenship here presented, I consider particularly striking the absence of clear variation in answers according to gender and age.

^14. For a more complete analysis, see Sciortino and Colombo (2004).