Analysis of statistical data from 1990 to the present day about immigration and income distribution, work market, housing situation, and informal economies

Main characteristics of immigration in Italy and in Europe

Introduction

Immigration of foreigners in Italy could be seen not just as a particularly meaningful case in comparison with the phenomena on other southern European countries but in the European Union on the whole. While internal migration and emigration were the fundamental factors of all European nations in the 19th century and even in the ‘60s in the 20th century, these events were linked to colonisation, to industrial growth and the aspiration of emancipation of the subordinate classes, in essence to the first «great transformation» [1], today’s migration is obviously connected to neo-liberal globalised development and as ever to aspirations of economic, social and political emancipation, which is common to all people in every part of the world, such being the second great transformation, regarded as the advent of post-modernism dating from the 1970s [2]. It is worth noting that the vast majority of modern day migration (that is since the 1970s) takes place among nations of the Southern hemisphere yet only a few come from the South to the wealthier countries. Beyond the «hydraulic» or «mechanistic» interpretations (push and pull effects), it should be remembered that the movement of human beings concerns just a part of local communities leaving, and most just for a short period of time and not too distant from their origin (because of persecution, war, natural catastrophes) and it is always characterised especially when aspiring to economic, social, political and even religious or cultural emancipation. This is often why the country of reception places an anomic, if not subversive, character upon these migrants, because they seem atopos, or rather human beings aspiring to freedom of movement, of belonging, of identification, thus freedom from the norms of the nation state (ref. Sayad, 1999; Dal Lago, 2006). Basically, as these authors suggest [3], the anxiety the immigrants cause (even more so the nomads/wanderers), (the supposed threat they may be for those «hosting» them) is due to the fact that migrants are state-less subjects and slightly de-culturalised [4]; actually they prove that "one can live anywhere and without a country of origin", they demonstrate that territory and culture are not essential for existence. It is even this that has pushed some conventional thinkers within the society of immigration to label immigrants as a part of their culture and not just as active and mobile individuals. By interpreting foreigners as "culture", our society believes to know them and we feel assured because we are frightened of their fluidity and mobility, not of their cultural extraneousness, especially when it of a minority and closed. In truth, the migrant threatens the claim that culture coincides with territory, that he is not representative of his supposed original culture, but he is an individual who has assembled a collage of different cultures, basically a hybrid, a «crossbreeding". The migrant creates suspicion, fear and hostility, because whether he likes it not, he is a vehicle of crossbreeding (atopos).

In the search for indispensable living space in order to survive and possibly to free himself, the migrant is clearly willing to adapt to any context where obstacles and hostility to his aspirations are likely to be more limited. This adaptability explains the high demand for citizenship in the countries of arrival, which shows not only the will to integrate but also to assimilate and to become more chauvinist than the autochthons and even ready to die for the new «homeland». It is also this same aspiration for emancipation that makes migrants more talented in economic matters, which are particularly enterprising (meaning the phenomena, paraphrasing Weber and Trevor Roper, it is possible to define the likely combination between «migrant ethic and the spirit of capitalism»). The main difference between modern day migration and those in the 19th and 20th centuries (up to the 1960s) lies above all in the consequences of the context (economic, social, political and cultural). The globalization of the neo-liberal development, which began at the start of the 1970s, was characterised by the interlacing of the financial and technological revolutions, which provoked industrial decline, and the relocation of every sort of activity in wealthy nations towards the needier ones. This caused a progressive decrease in the demand for labour, of its reproduction, demographic supply and for new citizens (all these typical elements of the industrial development of the state nations). One side of the need for new workers by wealthy nations concerns regular and steady work, but on the other hand is due to the so-called underground or shadow economies, a point that strikes at even the same citizens of the wealthy nations. With the start of the «stop» immigration policy adopted by the OECD countries in 1974, migrants were destined to ever increasing unstable or clandestine permanence, and so became an inferior part of the population or even non-people or human beings without rights. It is important to remember that since then the main reasons for the prohibition of migration appeals to the threat of the demographic boom in non-dominant countries, which would risk eroding the privileges of those already reduced by economic crises. Effectively, since then the prohibition of migration has accompanied the definition of this (migration) as a threat to the wealthy nations on a par with the mafias and terrorism. That period leads to the new attention the secret services paid to migration, which before had been merely a question of control and selection by the police. Also in this period the neo-conservative elaboration began, laying the blame for American and Western decline on migration (from the two main books by Huntington which to a certain extent can be considered a development in an ideological sense of FY 1979 by Weimberger). From this time, the 7 major industrialised nations have included the control of migration in the development of the new RMA, to the point of making it an aspect of the defence against internal-external threats [5]. Because of this, the budget for placement and integration has been consistently cut yet the budget for the «war on illegal immigration» has increased. This is reflected in the increasing accentuation of the difficulty in obtaining a visa, legal entrance, permits, humanitarian or political asylum, or renewing permits. As shown by various research in different countries, a device was primed which consistently reproduces legal immigration not only caused by illegal immigration but also by the difficulty in renewing permits while the majority of immigrants end up finding unstable or illegal work and accommodation and so not having the requirements for renewing the permit. The apparent paradox of prohibition and the war on migration is highlighted in the contrast of the huge increase in cost for the police-military system, both public and private, and the constant rise in the number of illegal immigrants. In spite of the numerous regularisations, the United States estimates that they will have about 13 million illegal entries in 2006, an increase of about 6 million since 11th September 2001, despite the Patriot Act and the strengthening of security on the borders.

In Europe the countries with the highest level of illegal immigration are those of the South, where there is also the highest rate of the shadow economies. The development of the free trade set up favours the ethnicisation of segments of activities and professions which grants leaders or the notables of groups, networks or circles of immigrants with the same origins, the role of power-brokers, as multiple mediators dominating over the immigrants, as was the case with the realisation of ‘cosa nostra’ for the control and exploitation of Italian immigrants in the United States. The so-called crisis of the pseudo-models assimilations, of the melting pot or «casual workers» is mainly because of the use of government immigration policies and practices which sustain inferiority and the growth of illegality more than peaceful and stable legal insertion. The ethnicisation, often attributed to the presumed will and dynamic of the immigrants, takes the form of a mechanism stopping or impeding political freedom (hence even cultural and religious freedom). These methods are exactly those forcing immigrants to close themselves in groups, networks or circles, of people with common roots, classified according to the major religion and ethnic group of their country of origin. This direction seems to point toward the end of the secular state in favour of a government formed through mediation among ethno-religious leaders, therefore to the detriment of universal human rights.

More than thirty years after the Helsinki agreements which recognised the right to migrate (approved in order to help dissidents and to destabilise the USSR and the totalitarian regimes), each so-called democratic nation should make bilateral and multilateral agreements with the migrant countries to adopt a common prohibition of all forms of migration. As with any type of prohibition, the consequence has been the huge increase in the risk of death during migration attempts, even the deaths of tens of thousands of migrants, the rising cost of both legal and illegal immigration, the growth in the business of human trafficking, of private security companies and of embedded NGOs, specialised in supporting this prohibition (border controls, hunting illegal immigrants, management of prisons for illegal immigrants and their expulsion). Within the major nations, the risk of victimisation because of neo-slavery, of hostility and racism or even the criminalisation and self-criminalisation hurts not only legal immigrants but especially the illegal ones. The immigrants are over-represented in the prisons of wealthy nations, like the Blacks in the United States. The condition of migrants in this post-modern period swings between ‘lucky’, those who are able to insert themselves legally and even become rich, to those who are in precarious conditions, damned by global liberalism, the dangerous new class and the unknown who die because of the prohibition on migration. To these possible destinies of today’s migrants can be added «human scraps» [6], meaning those people who cannot find a place or lose their place in the liberal world order and end up in the spiral of degradation which brings about their elimination (expelled several times form countries) or to eliminate themselves.

Human movement has been the driving force of human history, especially during the 19th and 20th centuries, which contributed to the prosperity and the posterity [7] of the world’s seven leading industrialised nations; today’s migrants seem destined to contribute only to liberal prosperity without gaining any benefits from such. The posterity generated by immigrants and becoming like the citizens of wealthy nations does appear to have much space in the liberal world order, if not in the ranks of the lower classes (the inferiorised), neo-slaves or emarginated, criminalised, self-criminalised and human waste. This has been made emblematic by the revolt of youth in the banlieues of French cities against insecurity and their reduced future prospects. It is even more disquietening the criminalisation and self-criminalisation of many young people in England, who have been classified (or classify themselves) as Islam terrorists.

Analysis of statistical data from 1990 to the present day about immigration and income distribution, work market, housing situation, and informal economies