Italy has been one of the main first countries of arrival on the migration routes to Europe in the last ten years. The Central Mediterranean Route, which connects Sub-Saharan Africa with Europe, passing through Italy, became one of the most active and dangerous routes for people crossing to Europe by sea (Albahari 2015), reaching its peak of arrivals in 2016 and declining over the following years.
The hotspot system, implemented from 2015 at the request of the EU, forces people to register their fingerprints in Italy immediately after their arrival and declare their intention to claim asylum. According to the Dublin Regulation,1 those seeking asylum in Europe must file their request in the first country of arrival. Claiming asylum becomes the only option for people whose journey to Europe has not been authorized through regular visas because of the unavailability of other means of regularization after their arrival, such as a work-related visa.2 However, for many asylum seekers coming from Sub-Saharan countries (in particular West African countries) who arrived between 2014 and 2018 (Forin and Frouws 2022), the likelihood of being granted asylum is low, and they are mostly considered by asylum authorities to be “economic migrants.” Not surprisingly, these countries also have the highest visa rejection rates for European countries, and their population is characterized by the condition of “involuntary immobility” (Carling 2002; Gaibazzi 2018a). While their mobility is strictly limited and considered undesirable by European countries, their politically and legally produced precariousness in Europe creates the condition for the systematic exploitation of their labor (Peano 2017; Perrotta 2015).
In this article, I conduct an ethnographic analysis of how West African migrants navigate mobility rules (Fradejas-García and Salazar, this issue), focusing on the case of a group of Gambian asylum seekers caught in the Italian asylum system. I explore how the trajectories, life projects, hopes, and desires (Kleist and Thorsen 2017; Schapendonk 2020) of people on the move are invested and reshaped in the humanitarian–securitarian nexus of the mobility and border regime (Andersson 2014; Casas-Cortes et al. 2015; De Genova 2013; Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013; Williams 2016). By “humanitarian–securitarian nexus” I refer to the way “humanitarian and securitarian discourses are simultaneously mobilized to both protect the rights of migrants and to enforce border policing strategies and govern migration” (Casas-Cortes et al. 2015:74). This feature is well expressed by the assistance/control mandate of the asylum system and reception facilities (Campesi 2015; Novak 2019; Pinelli 2015).
Engaging with the blurred and informal grounds generated by mobility rules in practice, I consider the (un)authorized and (un)ruly relationalities that developed during the years of the crisis of European borders (De Genova 2016) in the Italian reception system for asylum seekers.
In the first section of the article, I discuss the theoretical framework, which engages with the anthropological literature on informality and its role in state and mobility governance. The next section describes the Italian reception system, focusing on the informal sociality that flourished in the chaotic and unsupervised center where I was employed as social worker. In the third section, I analyze how informality and concurrent sets of rules did not simply create the space for rule-breaking and circumvention, but also a widespread distrust toward asylum dispositifs as well as marginalization and deportability. In the fourth section, I focus on the post-asylum trajectories of some of the Gambian migrants I met at the reception center, looking at how their paths were shaped by the relational network they built there. In the conclusion, I summarize how, in my work and research experience, informality and the opaque bureaucracies of the asylum system participated in creating systemic injustice, while also accidentally fostering unruly relationalities and support networks.
My current ethnographic research on the post-asylum lives of Gambian migrants in Italy informs the article, together with a ten-month (May 2015–March 2016) experience as an asylum worker and legal counselor at a reception center for asylum seekers in Central Italy. For this reason, the article is partially auto-ethnographic (Khosravi 2010; Reed-Danahay 2021) and locates my role and subjectivity as an asylum worker and researcher in the social setting I am analyzing. As my article encompasses both a critical reflection on my past role as a social worker and the discussion of the data gathered within the framework of my two postdoctoral research projects,3 I understandably provide more detailed information on interlocutors and places just in this last case and anonymize locations and identities of the people I engaged with as a social worker.
The article's scope is limited to the discussion of the specific reception context and post-asylum trajectories I refer to. Its finding, as much grounded in empirical ethnographic research, cannot be representative of the entire asylum system, especially in the case of its highly fragmented and heterogeneous scenarios in the Italian case. These limitations are also proven by the fact that I lost track of many former guests of the reception system, as they, for various reasons, which include the unbalanced ratio between asylum workers and seekers in the center, were never part of the relational networks I discuss here.
Theoretical framework
Kristin Bergtora Sandvik (2011) highlighted how informality and forbidden practices emerge as constitutive aspects of refugee camps, while Katerina Rozakou noted how much gray areas and juridical arbitrariness seem to characterize “irregular bureaucracies of asylum” (2017: 123). Informalities and irregularities are thus constitutive of such spaces and bureaucracies and to their power dynamics. This is particularly the case in the Italian context, where the juridical and administrative apparatuses of asylum and migration are marked by a hyper-production of rules and bureaucracies that work through opacity and the nullification of the same rules (Altin and Sanò 2017; Pinelli 2018).
In recent years, attention to the interplay between in/formality and im/mobility emerged in migration studies and transnationalism (degli Uberti 2021; Della Puppa and Sanò 2021; Fradejas-García et al. 2021). As formality and informality constantly co-produce and relate to each other, so do mobility and immobility. Their interaction in the transnational infrastructure organizing global inequalities of mobility has been well documented by multisited ethnographies focusing on migration industries, “crimmigration,” and mechanisms of illegalization (Andersson 2014; Feldman 2011). Indeed, mobility is not an equally distributed right, but it is shaped in an intersectional way through global power structures, giving birth to regimes in which the mobility of some is encouraged while that of others is contained, and which functions according to people's class, race, gender, and nationality (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013; Glick Schiller 2018).
Due to this, mobility rules should thus be approached as a “dynamic transnational field of intersecting . . . rules that are codified, negotiated, and made through multiple governmental and social practices” (Fradejas-García and Salazar, this issue). In this regard, it is crucial to ground the analysis of mobility rules through context-based ethnographic data, to trace how their multiscalarity is expressed empirically. The Italian asylum system provides a privileged setting to investigate informality as an integral part of state governance (Polese et al. 2018), and the concurrent and constantly changing sets of rules which regulate migrants’ mobility.
Such informality takes part in a “discipline of scarcity” (Vacchiano 2011: 101)—thus the flaunted scarcity of resources that configures asylum rights as a “gift” and a privilege (Rozakou 2012), redistributed by staff discretionary behaviors and favoritism (Giudici 2021). This opacity is further enhanced by the temporary and emergency-driven design of the Italian asylum system, which has precarious personnel and weak links with the territory (Avallone 2021). Asylum workers operate in understaffed facilities and are employed by cooperatives, associations, and NGOs that pay them 40 percent less than a state worker and embody the privatization of welfare services in Italy in the aftermath of the economic crisis and austerity measures (Giudici 2021; Muehlebach 2019). As a university degree in social work is generally not required for an asylum worker, employees come from different backgrounds, including anthropology, and do not always have previous work experiences in migration services (Mencacci and Spada 2017; Sacchi and Sorgoni 2020). This aspect makes the Italian asylum workforce much less predictable and regimented than those that anthropologists of development and humanitarianism have previously analyzed. Rather than the compassionate workers acting through the principle of humanitarian reason (Fassin 2011) or the subject manifesting a professional or unprofessional “need to help” a generic Other (Malkki 2015), asylum workers in the Italian context represent a heterogeneous and variously trained and motivated precarious category (Pilotto 2019).
In the center where I worked, such features and the rapid shifts in national asylum policies, made asylum workers go through a process of bureaucratic acculturation (Gupta and Sharma 2006) together with asylum seekers. The need to cope with pervasive opacity and precarity generated “shared points of need and struggle between groups that have often been approached as distinct a priori” (Cabot 2018: 7). As a result, rather than border-deconstructing migrants challenging mobility rules or a de-personalized infrastructure oppressing victimized refugees, I was soon enmeshed in a relational mycelium built through the ambiguities marking the dynamics of asylum's assistance/control (Kobelinsky 2008). I use the metaphor of mycelium not as a decorative element, but to point out three specific features: the submerged and unauthorized dimension of these relationships, growing underground in the same way as a fungal mycelium; the fact that their entanglement is constituted by the encounter of different personal and professional trajectories, as a mycelium is by a network of threads; and finally, that such networks in some cases emerged from their latency and concealment, producing social events and changes in people's post-asylum trajectories, as a mycelium produces fruits (what we normally call mushrooms).
These relations mediated (im)mobility, reconfigured migratory and existential projects, and became part of a larger transnational connectivity (Haile and Schapendonk, this issue). My attention toward them fosters the call for the “de-migrantization” of migration studies (Dahinden 2016), focusing instead on how migrants and non-migrants create entanglements in their encounter within the humanitarian–securitarian nexus. Border/asylum management as an engine of state transformation affects migrants and non-migrants alike (Novak 2019), generating asymmetrical but productive “contact zones” (Pratt 2021) where more informal “mobility rules” and tactics are made and negotiated by those interacting. In this context, the skill of debrouillage (Homaifar 2008) is employed not exclusively as a prerogative of West African migrants but also by the Italian asylum precariat (Standing 2011).
However, rather than a “shared continuum of precarity” (Cabot 2018: 7), I conceptualize these relationalities as articulating “differential proximities.” I use the term differential to mirror the definition of differential inclusion (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013), and remark how the severity of precarity always depends on the intersection of gender, socioeconomic status, racialization, ableism, and other axes of social differentiation (Baker 2014; Ettinger 2007; Munck 2013), as well as marking a more “naturalized” condition in the Global South and for undocumented migrants in the Global North.
Examining empirically migration governmentality's gray zones could nevertheless offer a possible “third space” between agency and structure, grounded in relational subject-crafting as a mobile process, constantly remaking and re-inventing hopes and desires as well as border infrastructures.
The Italian asylum system: Exceeding the institutional script through informal relationalities
The Italian asylum system is divided into the administrative and juridical apparatus charged with evaluating asylum claims, and the reception system where asylum seekers stay while waiting for their claim to be processed. Both systems fall under the responsibility of the Minister of the Interior but are administered by different sub-entities. The migrant reception system in Italy operates on different levels, going from hotspots to the more structured “second reception” system of SAI (Sistema di Accoglienza e Integrazione, Reception and Integration System, previously SPRAR).
CAS (Centri di Accoglienza Straordinaria) could work both as CARA (Centro di Accoglienza per Richiedenti Asilo), first reception centers (especially in the South of Italy), as well as reception facilities with more long-term and articulated ranges of services. The hybrid format of CAS was introduced in 2015 to cope with the “consistent and close arrivals of applicants” (Legislative Decree 142/2015, art. 11), and to fill the gap left by the second reception system of SAI, which could not accommodate all the asylum seekers who were arriving. As opposed to SAI, which is based on the voluntary cooperation of municipal administrations, CAS centers can bypass them as they are administered directly through local Prefectures. Not surprisingly, CAS has become the ordinary form of reception centers despite being deemed “extraordinary,” accommodating approximately 80 percent of eligible recipients (Avallone 2021).
CAS centers are not detentive, but they regulate the mobility of people, as asylum seekers cannot leave the centers for more than three days or they lose their reception rights. They are not forced to stay in CAS or in other asylum centers, but if they decide not to, they are left alone to provide for their basic needs and to manage their complicated legal situation as stigmatized and racialized subjects without firsthand knowledge of the context, often without networks to support them, and resources to mobilize. While somehow the asylum provided by a humanitarian government “traps” and disempowers asylum seekers (Campesi 2015), the expulsion from asylum facilities could further increase their vulnerability (Fradejas-García and Loftsdóttir, this issue).
The CAS at which I worked did not consist of a single center but of several facilities (three hotels and a dozen apartments), all registered in the local Prefecture as different CAS structures managed by the same NGO and distributed across an area of 1,200 square kilometers in the region of Marche. An average of 150 to 250 people lived in the CAS facilities, all men who arrived alone, coming almost exclusively from Nigeria, Gambia, Mali, Guinea, Benin, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. In the reception facilities and apartments, there were no staff apart from the social workers who moved between centers during the day and, in the case of hotels, their staff. Social workers were both women and men, the majority held a university degree in the humanities, and some had specialized in aid/humanitarian fields. While some were politically engaged in left-wing organizations, others were relatively removed from any political affiliation. Centers were located in small villages close to the central city or in the city itself, and the guests could move around the territory without any restriction, as we were not required to register the entry or exit of asylum seekers from the facilities. Some enrolled in local soccer teams, and all attended the Italian classes organized by the NGO. Some of them were working, as asylum seekers can be regularly employed 60 days after their arrival, but they rarely held regular contracts because employers took advantage of their condition, claiming that their six-month permits were too short for them to have a regular contract of employment.
In the context and at the time in which I worked, even the formal rules regulating CAS were flexible, discretionarily applied, and relatively easy to circumnavigate because of the novelty and chaos surrounding the so-called refugee crisis. For example, we often waited days before communicating to the Prefecture that an asylum seeker had left the center if he exceeded the maximum time he could spend away. At some point, realizing that people were not moving on to the second reception level (where a more substantial path toward “autonomy” was implemented), we started to provide job-seeking support, even if this service was not envisioned in formal CAS rules, trying to reach out to local companies and local associations for work and socialization opportunities. These practices turned into a form of vernacular humanitarianism and bottom-up practices (Brković 2020), which could also be evaluated through the concept of infrapolitics (Fradejas-García and Loftsdóttir, this issue; Scott 2012). But the blurring between formal and informal rules came also from institutional actors. For example, when I supported a group of asylum seekers to request the residency permit at the local Registration office (as established by a “formal rule” regarding the right of anyone residing at the same address for more than three months), the NGO managers told me the Prefecture and the Office had complained to them because they were not even sure “of the identities of these people.” The identity of asylum seekers substantiated through their claim for asylum seemed, to employees at the Registration Office, not “real enough” for them to be allowed a regular residency permit. The formal rule regarding their right to register was obstructed by the Registration office informal rule of refusing registration.
Within the daily life in the reception centers, many different registers and moral economies intertwined. We collaborated closely with an association of pro bono activist lawyers who denounced the dysfunctionalities of the system and the EU border regime. At the same time, we had to respond to the priorities of the Prefecture, which was concerned mainly with the security aspect of migration management. On the other hand, the NGO's identity was strongly oriented toward humanitarianism, inscribed in its foundation as a pacifist volunteer association established to bring humanitarian aid during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia.
The NGO coordinated multiple projects in the region, and as asylum workers, we were scarcely supervised and supported and were left alone to face multiple challenges with poor expertise and resources, as increasing numbers of people arrived. To cope, we developed spontaneous and informal strategies, which constantly crossed the boundaries of reception rules, disregarding them not as a conscious political act, but as something born from the impossibility of using them. Nothing was as it seemed: asylum seekers’ stories mostly did not correspond to the Geneva Convention's criteria necessary to obtain international protection; social workers did not have any specific training in social work; their role was more to contain than to assist people; and a system to protect asylum rights functioned as a tool for migration management. In this chaos of f(r)ictions, in which there was no correspondence with the rigid labeling of the system, other forms of (un)ruly and (un)authorized relationalities between social workers and asylum seekers began to appear. These were enhanced by sharing our everyday life and the spatial proximity in reception centers and public spaces of the small city where we lived, which created continuous opportunities for encounters: on the beach, in public squares, in bars and clubs at night. Social workers and the asylum seekers belonged to the same generation (they were in their twenties and thirties) and shared a “cosmopolitan imagination”—not just the prerogative of people from the Global North (Schapendonk 2020), but an aspiration that is pursued through migration (Salazar 2011: 548), as well as global consumption and transnational lifestyles (Beck 2006). I defined these relationalities as (un)authorized because they were not supported by institutional and managerial figures, which judged them as unprofessional and problematic because of the complicity between asylum workers and asylum seekers they might create against their management. Simultaneously, I inserted the brackets to highlight how such relationalities were at times willfully ignored or even mobilized to fill institutional gaps, as delays in payments and understaffing. However, even if these “differential proximities” could play a role in reinforcing the dialectic between care and control and were not free from reproducing dis/enabling and paternalistic attitudes in the uneven geographies of asylum (Novak 2021; Pallister-Wilkins 2015), they also signaled the “battleground” of asylum and immigration policies (Ambrosini 2021), where tensions between solidarity and rejection are expressed in daily interactions.
Not just solidarities: Uncertainty, suspicion, and opacity in the interplay between im/mobilities and informality
As scholars note, even if the Italian asylum authorities formally adhere to international rights on asylum, they oscillate in their interpretation depending on the political climate in which they operate,4 moving between closing and opening (Altin and Sanò 2017; Campesi 2015). West African asylum seekers, whose requests for asylum were almost systematically denied, were particularly caught up in this phenomenon. Among them, a small percentage were only able to access temporary humanitarian permits, which still restricted people's mobility and their ability to work in the Italian national territory.
Here I focus mainly on Gambian asylum seekers as they became my interlocutors in my postdoctoral research, and I present in particular the ethnographic profiles of a few of them. Still, even if it exceeds the scope of this contribution, it is important in this regard to remark how much nationality is crucial in determining legal statuses of asylum seekers. Similarly, diaspora networks and “host societies” criminalizing attitudes toward specific nationalities play a decisive role in shaping post-asylum trajectories.
This said, I chose to focus on asylum seekers from Gambia, primarily because of the strong bonds I developed with some of them during and after my work in the CAS, but also because they represent an interesting case. Despite the small size and population of their country, Gambians became one of the top nationalities applying for asylum in Italy between 2012 and 2018,5 but the Italian asylum authorities generally rejected their claims for international protection, regardless of the documented violations of human rights and the political persecution of opponents perpetrated by the autocratic regime of former President Yahya Jammeh, which lasted until 2016 (Altrogge and Zanker 2019). In addition to those who moved to other European countries (trying to elude the Dublin Regulation), many Gambians stayed in Italy and in the reception system, believing that they stood a higher chance of being granted international protection in Italy compared to other European countries (Schapendonk 2020), something that seems to be confirmed by Eurostat data.6
Confronted with protracted uncertainty and precariousness, Gambian and other West African asylum seekers at the reception centers where I worked needed to rationalize the function and goals of the institutional complex producing their marginalization. On their side, asylum workers juggled the responsibility of translating a juridical framework in perpetual change to asylum seekers, resulting in the ambiguous transfer of vital and secondary information (Whyte 2011), because they were afraid of being contradicted by the next change of regulations, and they were (in certain cases) incapable of seeing asylum seekers as the subjects of rights. These factors added to a loose code of conduct, in which different workers’ communication styles, gendered identities, political and ethical standpoints and plain personal characteristics played in unpredictable ways with the ones of the asylum seekers, building heterogeneous social grounds. While some of the social workers, as well as asylum seekers, adhered to the moral order of deservingness, others understood the asylum system as “undeserving” of their compliance, and were more focused on implementing tactics from below (De Certeau 2004). The diverse imaginaries regarding the role of state and institutions of asylum seekers and workers met with the opaque functioning of the reception/asylum apparatus. Some asylum seekers started hypothesizing a close connection between social workers and Territorial Commissions (the regional commissions charged with the evaluation of asylum requests), an interpretation somehow in line with the “Orwellian interpretation of the immigration regime” migrants have (Haile and Schapendonk, this issue). This explanation was much more logical than the system they had to face: why keep people in reception centers, provide them with essential services, and ask them to become volunteers to be better received by the local population, if they were to be systematically denied a legal status? What was the connection between not being able to build an autonomous life by being granted a document, and their prolonged stay in the reception limbo? The paradox consisted in the fact, at least in the region where I worked (this decision in fact depends on the local Prefecture coordinating the CAS), that those dragging their asylum request through multiple appeals could be hosted in asylum facilities. In contrast, those who obtained a permit would have to leave the structure.
Amadou,7 a Gambian former asylum seeker and French teacher, changed his mind about the connivance between asylum workers and members of the Territorial Commissions after he started working as cultural mediator at a reception facility and realized social workers do not communicate with the latter. Despite this, he, and many others I know, still sees the reception infrastructure as monetizing the presence of migrants and capitalizing on their desires for mobility. In this way, they deconstruct the humanitarian rhetoric of NGOs as “caring” and place them in continuity with other actors in the migration industry who facilitate/control their movements (Schapendonk et al. 2020).
As Ignacio Fradejas-Garcia, Abel Polese and Fazila Bhimji have noted, “the border plays the double role of contention externally and of the threat of deportability internally” (Fradejas-García et al., 2021). Despite asylum workers’ efforts to compensate for the lack of resources marking asylum management and the CAS system, this was not enough to counter the effects of a system producing people's illegalization, containment, and consequential exploitation in the structurally unregulated work economies, like the one of agriculture. While, on the one hand informality allowed for relational mycelia to grow, it also relegated people into juridical and social gray zones, which furthered their precarization.
Informal networks as resources in post-asylum trajectories
When the Italian asylum system partially collapsed, mainly as a consequence of borders’ externalization,8 many NGOs, among which the one where I used to work, closed their reception centers. After months of unpaid work, my former colleagues lost their jobs in the asylum system, and those hosted had to leave the facilities. But while the reception structures (which should have dictated the terms and conditions of our relationships) disappeared, some of the relationships survived, and even strengthened, such as Baboucarr's.
Baboucarr, a Gambian who worked as a shepherd before embarking to Europe, lived seven years of legal limbo and exploitative working experiences (among which including as an unpaid social workers’ assistant in one of the reception centers where he stayed), going from appeal to appeal due to the Italian authorities’ systematic rejection of his asylum request. Finally, thanks to the pandemic and work-related emergency regularization promoted in 2020 for undocumented migrants, he obtained a temporary working visa thanks to his work in a farmhouse. He never left the area where his reception center was placed originally, and he attributes its final accommodation in the Italian context to a few asylum workers he met there: “I was lucky enough to meet two or three people, so even when I was desperate I thought it would be a betrayal [to do something bad] that I would never be able to forget. This is the thing that gave me more strength, more courage.”
Asylum encounters and relations also played a decisive role in some of the “mixed” couples I met, constituted by former social workers and asylum seekers, like Ibrahim and Francesca, whom I have known for five years. Ibrahim, a now 32-years-old Gambian coming from the coastal urban areas who worked also as musician and DJ, arrived in Italy in 2016 and was granted refugee status because of his family's political problems with the former government of the Gambia. He was later employed as an asylum worker in the same reception center where I used to work with Francesca, a girl around his age who is originally from the city where we were living, and who is now his partner and the mother of his son. He had first met Francesca at a different reception center where he had been living and which had supported him during his asylum claim. Now the couple exited the asylum work sector and have different jobs, but still live in the same city. Francesca highlighted how her encounter with Ibrahim happened during her first experience at a reception center, at the very beginning of the so-called refugee crisis. There, asylum workers and seekers, had to build everything from scratch, as there were no previously established standards of work: “We were their first and only reference point, and they were for us: we grew together,” she told me. Uncertainty was used as an open space and a tool for creative survival (Cooper and Pratten 2015; Kleist and Thorsen 2017), to face an emergency-driven and unplanned system of reception. In this regard, she remarked how “this did not correspond to what the reception center was supposed to be,” alluding to the more interpersonal, (un)ruly relationalities not envisioned by the system's rules. These heterodoxic relationships left a significant legacy, as “we remained friends afterward,” and with Ibrahim, she even engaged in a lifeproject. Ibrahim, for his part, highlighted how the closure of the reception facility pushed many people to move to other cities, weakened connections and the newly constituted Gambian mutual aid association. He said that his work experience in the reception system made him understand that “good people are working there,” and that the job “is not an easy one” because social workers have to create a buffering zone between a hostile environment and people who are not familiar with the cultural and political context.
As Mezzadra and Neilson have argued, migrants’ struggles are concerned with everyday life: persisting in a particular space, despite being often surrounded by juridical and social hostility (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). The strategies they use are many,9 including the ability to transform their experience in the asylum system and their own linguistic and cultural knowledge into a form of professional expertise, as in the case of Amadou, Ibrahim, and Baboucarr. These débrouillage practices play within the space of maneuver created by an uncertain and precarious setting (Homaifar 2008; Schapendonk 2020; Vigh 2009) and with the (un)ruly relational networks to which they are part of. In this regard, Amadou told me that the people working in the asylum system had a chance to meet and get to know who the asylum seekers are, and to understand their “humanity.” As Irene Peano noted, “More than labor, civil, social or political rights, it is in the language of humanness (and against a dehumanizing humanitarianism that projects migrants as needy, vulnerable and passive) in which many migrants frame their demands” (Peano 2017: 98). Looking at how the category of “humanity” is mobilized by migrants, offers an opportunity to denaturalize its implicit Eurocentrism, noticing how, for example, in the Mande ethnolinguistic area it expresses notions of hospitality, empathy, and “human rights” that depart from those of the Western tradition (Gaibazzi 2018b).
In this regard, the cases I presented here go beyond migrants’ will to “massage” actors in the field of transnational mobility to ensure the continuation of migratory projects (Schapendonk 2018) and include non-migrants as integral parts of their existential projects. These stories represent an opportunity to move towards a perspective that does not exclusively envision a migrant “agency” based on their own pure self-interest. Instead, they highlight how people on the move deal with mobility regimes and rules through their desires, affects, contradictions, decisions, and connections: in other words, through the full humanity they so relentlessly want to claim back.
Conclusion
In the ethnography I presented, the built-in informality of the Italian asylum system played a double and opposite role in mobility rules. While on the one hand, it produced opacity, arbitrariness, and inequalities, on the other hand, it pushed asylum seekers and asylum workers to develop unauthorized relationships and alliances, which sometimes proved crucial in the post-asylum phase. Indeed, the prolonged immobility endured by asylum seekers in reception centers made their encounters with asylum workers much more than casual and forced instrumental relationships with street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky 2010). The multiple paradoxes and aporias contained in mobility rules, together with substantial institutional neglect, accidentally produced shared points and differential proximities between asylum seekers and asylum workers. These shared points extended in some cases in a relational mycelium that acted as a precarious safety net. This happened because asylum seekers and asylum workers did not just passively endure the subjectification of the asylum system but tried to manipulate rather than just endure informality. In the case of asylum seekers who themselves became asylum workers, their double experience allowed them to understand the difference between the system's restrictive and aporetic structure and the effort that many social workers put into making it less de-humanizing.
As I am still partially enmeshed in the relational mycelium I described in this article, I can see how its various know-hows, resources, and connections are mobilized; these might include legal consultancy, job seeking, or advice on decision-making about the future. This support is not completely unidirectional: on more than one occasion, I witness migrant friends telling unemployed Italian former colleagues about job positions at their companies or organizations. They also provided their skills as linguistic and cultural mediators in various personal and professional situations. As the redundant social workers joined the job market, they had to “hustle” as migrants often do, less and less protected by a shrinking welfare system. Nevertheless, our privileges as white Europeans still differentiate our experience of precarity radically: in their post-asylum lives the migrants we know faced multiple challenges in adapting to a highly hostile and blatantly racist context, thanks also to the discursive exploitation of the so-called refugee crisis and the inefficiency of the asylum system coming from far-right political parties in the country.
While those who are on the move try to find new ways to cross increasingly militarized borders, those in the gray zones of the post-asylum phase are trying to find ways to become incorporated as citizens, playing with multiple legal orders and through creative engagements with actors in the field (Fradejas-García and Salazar, this issue). These actors could sometimes include former asylum workers, and these (un)ruly relationalities could act as a counterpoint to unruly mobilities.
Notes
The Dublin Regulation is a European Union Law that had its most recent formulation in 2013 (Dublin Regulation III). It establishes that the first EU Member State in which the fingerprints of a third-country national seeking asylum are stored or an asylum claim is lodged is responsible for a person's asylum claim.
The Bossi-Fini Law of 2002, the last one approved in Italy to regulate migration, states that only those who are already in possession of a work contract that allows them to maintain themselves financially can enter Italy.
They consist in one Postdoctoral fellowship at the São Paulo Research Foundation (2019–2021), grant n.2018/22947-3 and one Research Fellowship at the Department of Education of the University of Bologna (2021/2022). Both institutions provided an ethical assessment of the research plan and all the people interviewed gave informed consent. The writing of the article benefited also from the German Research Foundation (DFG) grant number 499334771.
Despite the existence of a Common European Asylum System (CEAS), there is a proliferation of protection categories among the various EU countries which creates very different experiences of asylum, giving birth to a “ordered fragmentation” of the right to international protection (Demetriou 2022). The situation is then further fragmented by the differences between the Territorial Commissions of the Italian regions and the context-dependent way in which asylum facilities are administered in various districts.
The number of asylum requests from Gambian nationals in Italy from 2012 to 2021 is 38,145. The total quests for the whole of Europe in the same period is approximately 70,000. Eurostat database: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/migr_asyappctza__custom_11184071/default/table?lang=en.
Gambians have filed for asylum mainly in Italy and Germany. If we compare just the year 2017, in which the most requests for asylum were filed by Gambian migrants in Italy and Germany (respectively 6,430 and 6,635), 2,605 positive decisions (of which 2,405 were humanitarian statuses) were made in Italy, compared with 455 in Germany (of which 185 where humanitarian statuses). Eurostat, “First instance decisions on applications by type of decision, citizenship, age and sex: Annual aggregated data.” https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/MIGR_ASYDCFSTA__custom_2143767/default/table?lang=en (accessed 15 April 2024).
All the names in this article are pseudonyms to protect the interlocutors involved.
Policies of border externalization were pursued in Italy mainly with the Italy–Libya agreements of 2017. Italian authorities committed to the logistical and financial support of the so-called Libyan coastguard to prevent “boat migration” close to the Central Mediterranean Route.
To protect the “right to opacity” (Glissant 1997 in Khosravi2018 ) of migrants, I prefer not to disclose these strategies in detail, recognizing how opacity and secrecy play important roles also in making their mobility possible in the face of politically crafted adversity.
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