Rules, Paper, Status: Migrants and Precarious Bureaucracy in Contemporary Italy

Abstract

This important and insightful book documents migrants’ everyday encounters with Italy’s ‘‘documentation regime,’’ a bewildering government bureaucracy lacking transparency, accountability, and consistency that migrants must navigate to secure and maintain legal status, bring family members into the country, and attain Italian citizenship. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2009 and 2016 in a city in the northern EmiliaRomagna region, Rules, Paper, Status: Migrants and Precarious Bureaucracy in Contemporary Italy follows migrants, their nongovernmental advisors, and public officials who implement and bend the rules interpreting Italy’s exclusionary yet flexible immigration laws that regulate the lives of migrants residing in Italy. Anna Tuckett vividly describes how Italy’s frequently changing immigration laws and their inconsistent implementation produce anxiety, insecurity, and tensions for migrants, who experience continued social marginalization even if they are long-term, culturally integrated residents. Yet she also highlights how migrants with knowledge of Italian immigration laws can become brokers and advisors to other migrants, in the process building social and economic capital while ensuring that Italy’s migration bureaucracy does not succumb to its own irrationality. The book is clearly structured and has eight chapters. The Introduction discusses the increased bureaucratization of migration flows and provides an overview of migrants in Italy and Italian immigration laws, which are simultaneously harsh and lenient. Chapter One introduces the book’s central fieldwork site: a migrant advice center affiliated with a labor union that helps migrants with filling out forms and offers advice on navigating Italy’s precarious immigration bureaucracy. Chapters Two and Three explore how first-generation migrants manipulate and successfully navigate this bureaucracy using both informal and extralegal rule-bending, practices that can put migrants in danger of losing legal status or prevent them from obtaining Italian citizenship. Chapter Four focuses on community brokers, migrants who use their knowledge of Italian immigration laws and cultural dexterity to help others while improving their own community standing and socioeconomic mobility. While Chapter Five considers how encounters with Italy’s immigration bureaucracy create upset and disjuncture for 1.5and second-generation migrants, Chapter Six discusses how uncertain legal status, discrimination, and lack of social mobility cause many migrants to feel disappointment and personal failure and to view Italy as a stepping stone to a better destination elsewhere in Europe. The Conclusion contextualizes the book’s findings within broader processes of contemporary migration and globalization and points out the political utilities—to different public and private actors—of the Italian immigration system’s contradictions. One of the book’s strengths lies in its contributions to the literature on the immigration bureaucracy. In contrast to much of the existing scholarship on how migrants engage with nation-state borders and their regulatory structures, this book zooms in on how migrants engage with the ‘‘documentation regime’’ that regulates their lives while living within Italy’s nation-state boundaries. The book illustrates well how ‘‘legal’’ and ‘‘illegal’’ are not statuses created by migrants’ practices of crossing borders with or without papers; rather, they result from confusing and rapidly changing legal and bureaucratic Reviews 383