By Elisa Lanari | Issue 26
In March 2020, Italy’s Veneto region became one of the first hotspots of the Covid-19 pandemic in the Western world. In response to the emergency, local and nationwide activist networks quickly launched a campaign calling for the regularisation of all migrants on Italian soil. The idea was to give them the residency requirements necessary to access health and social benefits needed to deal with the pandemic. As these activists had initially feared, migrants - especially asylum seekers and refugees - were the most vulnerable to the social and economic effects of the health emergency. The Security Decree passed in 2018 (DL 113/2018) had led to the confinement of asylum seekers in overcrowded facilities. With the onset of the pandemic, those constricted inside these facilities experienced further limitations to their personal freedoms and were more exposed to the virus. Many faced heightened exploitation and unsafe working conditions due to their precarious legal status. The stalling of administrative procedures left most migrants unable to apply for international protection or to secure a residency permit. Several studies have shed light on these immediate effects. However, we know less about how policy responses to the pandemic, and civil society mobilisations around these policies, affected asylum seekers’ trajectories and possibilities to build a dignified life in the medium-term.
In my ethnographic research in different parts of Veneto, I found that local activist networks and personal relationships were key in shaping the emplacement of asylum seekers both during and after the pandemic. The term ‘emplacement’, originally introduced by Glick Schiller and Çağlar, refers to “a person’s efforts to settle and build networks of connection within the constraints and opportunities of a specific locality”. NGOs and civil society organisations can support this process through connecting migrants with locally available services and opportunities, as well as through programmes focused on housing, job and language training. By cutting funding for reception programmes, however, the 2018 Security Decree also hampered NGOs’ ability to assist asylum seekers in ways that went beyond merely addressing basic needs. Some local activists and organisations proved to be extremely resilient in the face of these policy shifts and of the subsequent Covid-19 emergency, retooling their strategies to help asylum seekers in a more informal manner.
In July 2020, I attended a meeting hosted inside a social centre in a midsize city of Veneto. The centre hosted a transitional housing programme for asylum seekers and refugees along with a series of other initiatives, ranging from an Italian language school to a boxing club. Some of these activities continued to take place (more or less informally) during the lockdown period, providing asylum seekers with a place to socialise, learn, and exchange information. The meeting was the centre’s first official event after lockdown measures had been lifted. Alice, the activist running the housing shelter, and her ‘comrade’ Sandra, who worked for a local union, had organised it with the goal of explaining the bureaucratic intricacies of the new Amnesty Decree (DL 34/2020), passed by the national government a few months earlier. The Decree, commonly known as ‘Sanatoria’, was a temporary measure aimed at favouring the regularisation of informal work relations in the sectors of agriculture, farming, and domestic labour, with the official goal of protecting individual and collective health (art. 103 c.1). Since the measure was passed, Sandra and Alice had been working painstakingly to ‘chase’ information about whether asylum seekers were also eligible to apply, something that the government officially confirmed only months later. While critical of the narrow scope of the Sanatoria, the two women saw it as a small window of opportunity of which asylum seekers could - and should - take advantage, knowing that many of them had been stuck in a legal limbo, awaiting the adjudication of their pleas. In the following months, they acted as intermediaries with employers interested in serving as sponsors, helped both parties gather the necessary paperwork, and followed up with the competent office when applications were not regularly processed. As a result of these efforts, nearly all of the asylum seekers they helped were successful in obtaining a residency permit, which many later used to secure employment in a sector that better matched their opportunities and aspirations.
Unlike those who lived in urban areas, asylum seekers who were resettled in small rural and mountain towns as part of national dispersal policies could not rely on the help of local activist networks and unions with a history of helping migrant populations. The pandemic exacerbated experiences of social and spatial isolation associated with living in these peripheral places, which myself and others have documented. Even though my interlocutors were no longer confined inside reception facilities, they still suffered from not being able to engage in mobilities that were crucial for their survival and well-being, including both short- and long-distance movements to follow seasonal work opportunities, socialise, and meet with co-nationals.
For some, however, being immobilised within the narrow social and geographical space of a town of 3000 inhabitants provided opportunities to deepen existing relationships in their place of residence. This was the case of Lamine, a young man from the Gambia who had been spending his summers working in a mountain hut managed by Mario, a single man in his late sixties. During the lockdown period, Lamine and Mario began to hang out more regularly, sharing meals and going on hikes together – something that was facilitated by the sparsely populated environment of mountain areas. Through this, Mario recounted, “we formed a strong friendship, a friendship based on keeping each other company and caring for each other”. For Mario, this care translated into supporting Lamine’s aspirations to work as a cook, giving him more responsibilities in the kitchen and helping him enrol for a vocational training programme. The relationship between Moussa, a Senegalese asylum seeker, and his landlady Maddalena was also one based on mutual care. Their friendship bond deepened during the pandemic, when Moussa looked after Maddalena and her house while she was hospitalised for Covid-19. As Moussa’s asylum plea was eventually denied, Maddalena decided to act as his sponsor, so that he could take advantage of the Sanatoria to finally regularise his status and sign a permanent contract at the factory where he had worked for years.
With the Covid-19 pandemic, local networks and civil society actors became all the more crucial in mediating asylum seekers’ access to housing, employment, and legal status. In rural places, these forms of support are seldom formalised; instead, they exist in the private realm of personal relationships. Cities are more likely to have an established organisational infrastructure that can be leveraged to support migrants’ emplacement. In either case, it was the existence of local networks and relationships that convinced – and allowed – many of my interlocutors to remain in an area that was not originally part of their migratory aspirations. This brings us to the words of Ahmed, whose erratic flight included being illegalised in the UK, stranded for months in Calais, and eventually ending up in the Italian mountains. During his time in the reception system, he became friends with Mario, a town resident and NGO worker who helped him find housing and employment after he was granted refugee status. “Do you want to know why I am here, in this little town?” Ahmed asked me as a way of summing up his narrative, “Because of Mario, because Mario is here”.
Elisa Lanari
Elisa is a socio-cultural anthropologist and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, where she is carrying out a project on the afterlives of refugee ‘welcome’, diversity and im/mobilities in an Alpine region of northern Italy. She has a PhD from Northwestern University (2019), where her research focused on contested place- and city-making in Atlanta’s racially diverse suburbs (USA). Her work has been featured in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Critique of Anthropology, City & Society, and Citizenship Studies, among others.
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