Immigrant Activism and the Role of Left-Wing Allies in Exclusion (original) (raw)
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As interest in the processes of integration of immigrants and ethnic minorities grows among European scholars, the role of multiple actors in shaping civic and political participation by people of migrant background needs to be further examined. Building on the literature on migration, this study addresses the following research question: What accounts for differences in forms of civic and political participation by activists of migrant background at the local level? In order to answer this question, I have mapped the forms of participation by activists of migrant background in four Italian cities, and examined the discourses and practices of multiple actors involved in the sphere of immigration under an increasingly hostile national environment. To understand differences in participation, I argue that it is important to go beyond an exclusive consideration of the state and institutional actors, to look at both institutional and non-institutional actors, and to examine how, through their interaction, they shape opportunities and constraints for participation. This work investigate both conventional and non-conventional channels in four Italian cities and considers immigrant activists as relevant political actors, who are able to mobilize and shape participation through their interaction and alliances with the organizations of the receiving society. This research presents three main findings. The first is that approaches to integration adopted by local actors matter. This study identified three main approaches to integration: 1) assistance, based on the idea that immigrants are in need and thus focuses on the promotion of delivery of services and advocacy; 2) intercultural, founded on the idea that immigrants are would-be citizens and that integration is reciprocal; and 3) political rights promotion, which focuses on the idea that immigrants are entitled to basic political rights, and thus encourages the opening of channels of participation to immigrants who are denied local voting rights. The empirical analysis shows that while the assistance approach does not encourage participation because it conceives immigrants as passive subjects, the other two approaches encourage civic and political participation respectively. Second, this study demonstrates that left-wing actors matter. It shows that the actors who contribute to opening channels for participation are not only moderate and institutional left-wing actors, such as local authorities, main political parties, and trade unions, but also radical and non-institutional left-wing organizations. Left-wing actors interpret and act differently with respect to immigration and participation and this affects how immigrant activists mobilize. Third, this study underlines the role of perception of the opportunities for participation and shows how activists of migrant background appropriate the discourses and practices of left-wing actors. It documents how immigrant activists respond to the opportunities offered by other actors and how they contribute to the opening of channels for participation by creating alliances with the left-wing organizations and by challenging the discourses and practices of local actors. Key words: Immigrants’ civic and political participation; Local configurations of power; Institutional and non-institutional actors; Conventional and non-conventional channels; Approaches to integration; Alliances with left-wing actors; Bottom-up approaches; Italy.
Acta Politica, 2014
The structure of the Italian party system pushes the mainstream right and left to adopt different strategies on immigration in spite of a certain ideological and definite policy convergence. First, in a context of bipolar competition, the mainstream right prefers to cooperate, rather than compete, with the anti-immigrant radical right. Second, while the mainstream left dominates the centre-left coalition, the mainstream right has found itself subject to and torn by the populist tendencies of the centre-right coalition leader Silvio Berlusconi. The analysis shows that the mainstream left has endorsed concerns over security and border control, while remaining open to the social, cultural and (to a lesser extent) political integration of immigrants. In contrast, the mainstream right has appeared increasingly split between a component 'contaminated' by Berlusconi, which makes some concessions to the radical right; and a moderate component, which is more sensitive to liberal ideas and/or to the solidaristic remarks of the Catholic Church. The reality of the Italian welfare system and labour market would appear to create more favourable conditions for the ideological approach of the mainstream left. However, the mainstream right has benefited from its alliance with the radical right as it has constantly owned the immigration issue.
As interest in immigrant mobilisations in hostile national environments grows among migration scholars, the reasons why immigrants in vulnerable conditions engage in radicalised mobilisation at the local level and why they make alliances with controversial non-institutional radical-left actors need to be further explained. This study examines the conditions of mobilisation and radicalisation by undocumented immigrants in Brescia (a mid-sized city in Northern Italy) through the lens of a contentious moment that took place for two months in 2010, known as the Struggle of the Crane (Lotta della gru). It addresses two questions: why have undocumented immigrants in Brescia been mobilised to contentious political activism? And, why have they created partnerships with non-institutional radical-left organisations, rather than institutional non-state organisations, such as the Church and traditional trade unions? In addition to the hostile national context, discrimination and repression by local authorities triggered the motivation for mobilisation and nourished the radicalisation of the struggle and its endurance. Additionally, competing discourses and practices over immigrants' access to rights and deservingness by multiple non-state actors played a key role in shaping alliances. The long-lasting alliance with the radical left since the 1990s was renewed and reinforced in 2010 by immigrants' growing distrust towards institutional nonstate actors.
Immigration has become an issue often framed with reference to the protection of external borders, welfare state, cultural and ethnic identity, increased risk of terrorism in most of the major receiving countries in Europe. Yet, despite restrictive immigration controls and exclusionary rhetoric in these countries, population inflows continue. Building on the literature which points out that migration policies often ‘fail’ to achieve restrictive objectives due to various institutional constraints preventing governments to realise their electoral promises (Boswell 2003; Calavita 2004; Castles 2004a, 2004b; Freeman 1995; Geddes 2008), this paper analyses the relation between policy debates and policy-making in migration domain. The processes through which immigration debates and policies evolved in Italy are analysed by drawing on qualitative data for the period covering 1996 to 2010. The paper elaborates on how, faced with the so-called immigration pressures, different discursive categories of immigrants and immigration are created by the right-wing political parties in Italy, the extent to which nodal points of the right-wing immigration debates were reflected in the design of immigration control tools and what the link between rhetoric and practice reveals about the processes shaping politics of immigration control.
Mobilizing against ‘the invasion’: Far right protest and the ‘refugee crisis’ in Italy
While far right politics have long been considered exclusively a party phenomenon, the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ acted as a catalyst for far-right street protest, triggering a diffusion of extra-parliamentary initiatives against migrants and asylum-seekers throughout Western Europe. Based on new empirical data from face-to-face interviews with anti-immigration activists, and a quantitative content analysis of far-right mobilization over the last two decades, the paper pro-vides an empirical account of the rationale, nature and form of far-right mobiliza-tion on migration in Italy. Quantitatively, I use Political Claim Analysis to trace the major characteristics of far-right protest until 2015-2016. Qualitatively, I draw on 13 face-to-face interviews with activists engaged in different forms of anti-immigration protest, to explore the meaning that they attribute to their initiatives and political mobilization. The findings indicate that the emergence of the ‘refugee crisis’ changed anti-immigration protest in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Not only far-right activism has intensified in recent years, but it also simultaneous-ly shifted from institutional and conventional forms of action, to street protest. The far right successfully seized the opportunities made available by public deba-tes on the crisis, engaging in direct confrontational actions as well as grassroots activities aimed at raising awareness among the citizenry. In this respect, whilst the predominant themes in anti-refugee mobilization discourse was the threat of an ‘invasion’ by migrants, anti-refugee propaganda mixed several themes that are highly embedded in the Italian political context, such the corruption of the political system, and the disillusionment of ordinary citizens with the establishment and mainstream politics.
S. Lazar (ed.), Where are the unions? Workers and Social Movements in Latin America, the Middle East and Europe. London: Zed Books., 2017
Within the latest wave of anti-austerity protests in Europe and beyond, the Italian case is often considered to be a sort of anomaly. The country has not experienced the same coherently organized and readily recognisable forms of opposition to the neoliberal onslaught that have characterized others, such as Spain or Greece. At the same time, it has never lacked radical anti-capitalist politics, which developed in different forms. Indeed, for decades Italy has constituted, in some ways, a reference point for social movements outside its borders. Here, I wish to reflect on the presence within the heterogeneous constellation of struggles that has emerged in recent years of specific subjects, namely migrants, and on the importance of the labour dimension in their mobilizations. If not always self-evident or acknowledged, both aspects are central in understanding some of the most significant instances of struggle that have shaken Italian public opinion and the social-movement scene-all the more so following the current mediatized hype about a supposed 'migration crisis' across the EU, with Italy as one of the main locations in this spectacle.
Migrants as activist citizens in Italy
OpenDemocracy, 2012
In 2010 and 2011 migrants behaved like activist citizens throughout Italy, initiating a new cycle of struggles in the crisis of neoliberalism. Their contestation of an exclusionary, racialized and competitive model of society could become a goal shared by migrants and nationals alike.