Migrants as Activist Citizens in the Crisis of Neoliberalism: Understanding the New Cycle of Struggles in Italy more

Conference “Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship”, Milton Keynes, 06 – 07 February 2012 Migrants as Activist Citizens in the Crisis of Neoliberalism: Understanding the New Cycle of Struggles in Italy Federico Oliveri* Sciences for Peace Interdisciplinary Centre, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy This article analyses a series of migrant mobilizations which took place in 2010 throughout Italy: the tumult in Rosarno, the migrant general strike, the campaign against undeclared work in Nardò and the occupation of a construction crane in Brescia. Egin Isin’s principles of investigating acts of citizenship provide a theoretical background for understanding them as a coherent, new cycle of struggles in the crisis of neoliberalism. As proved by those mobilizations, migrants can significantly contribute to open the boundaries of neoliberal citizenship, when they construct themselves as activist citizens. Moreover, the contestation of an exclusionary, ‘racialized’ and competitive model of society can become a goal shared by migrants and Italians as well, opening to an alternative social model based on equal entitlements to rights, solidarity and real democracy. Keywords: Migration policies, migrant struggles, contentious politics, citizenship, neoliberalism, racism, Italy. DRAFT PAPER UNDER REVIEW – PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE Introduction: acts worthy to be remembered “We will be remembered”. Who left this writing on the wall of an abandoned industrial site near Rosarno, in the southern Italian region of Calabria, didn’t know how right he would be. The anonymous writer was one of the hundreds of migrants from many African countries working in this region as orange-pickers during the winter. Year after year, they transformed the old olive oil factory into a highly precarious and uncomfortable shelter. The sentence on the wall sounds proud, challenging and even * Corresponding author: Email: f.oliveri@sns.it F. Oliveri solemn. It appears like a message in a bottle, send before the authorities removed almost all Africans from the town – “for their own security”. It refers to the tumult exploded on 7 January 2010 in Rosarno, where hundreds of migrants rebelled as two of them were injured by three Italian youngsters in a drive-by shooting. The revolting workers set on fire rubbish bins, destroyed shop windows and cars, engaged in a urban guerrilla with the police, and finally they became the target of a ‘black man hunting’ unleashed by the resident population: during the same night three migrants were beaten with iron bars and two were shot. In the next three days, with the excuse of protecting them from the rage of Italians, about 2,000 African workers either were evacuated by the police or fled voluntarily. Two years later, those dramatic days are still remembered and the remembrance produced new political action. On 7 January 2012 many grass-roots associations, antiracist and social justice movements, collectives of workers and neo-communist parties met in the sites of the tumult and announced the beginning of a new campaign – SOS Rosarno – against exploitation, underground and criminal economies, unsustainable projects for local development (Candito 2012). The protagonists of those days are especially remembered, not simply because of the explosion of their indignation against systematic racist violences – the last shooting was just one of the countless acts of oppression against them. They are not even remembered because they revolted against the ‘Ndrangheta – the local mafia which dominates also the fruit and vegetable businesses besides controlling drug and arm trades – denouncing to the police frauds, extortions and killings in a way that Italians have never dared to do (Mangano 2010). They are remembered because through their words and acts they put into question the dominant public discourse on immigration as a security and border control problem. They unexpectedly decided to denounce the hypocrisy of an affluent (yet formally Conference “Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship”, Milton Keynes, 06 – 07 February 2012 democratic) society based on the de facto legalized exploitation of disposable people, and on their ‘minoritization’ though institutional and everyday racism (Oliveri 2009). They proved that they are not just how the current “prejudicial stereotypes” depict them, as victims of the system, criminals, or temporary useful and over-exploitable workers (Oliveri 2008), but people that exercise rights even when they are not entirely entitled to them according to the law. They collectively demonstrated that it is possible to stand up and ask for respect even when you live under the continuous risk of being deported. The political nature of those events was so clear and their potential of emulation so explosive that former Italian Minister of Interior, member of the virulently antiimmigrants movement Northern League, tried to restore the mainstream view affirming that: “There’s a difficult situation in Rosarno, like in other places, because for years illegal immigration – which feeds criminal activities – has been tolerated and nothing effective has ever been done about it”. More than in these words, the fear for the possible spread of the revolt appeared in the Minister’s order to realize a complete cleansing of the rebellion scene, making of Rosarno “the world’s only entirely white town” (Hopper 2010). Despite all the manipulative and repressive efforts, the tumult of Rosarno became a symbolic and discursive reference and an extremely powerful stimulus for all the following migrant struggles in Italy. Hannah Arendt (1973, p. 220) was right when she affirmed that “what saves the affairs of mortal men from their inherent futility is nothing but this incessant talk about them, which in turn remains futile unless certain concepts, certain guideposts for future remembrance, and even for sheer reference, arise out of it”. In fact, it is true that the idea of an Italian “Day without immigrants”, inspiring the migrant general strike on 1 March 2010, has circulated even before the events of Rosarno; but it is also true that “without taking account of the revolt, it would be difficult to explain the acceleration in the organization processes and F. Oliveri in the circulation of the information, among the migrants and in the public opinion in general” (Cobbe and Grappi 2011, p. 67). In the same way, in a chain of mobilizations communicating with each other from the North to the South of the country, the migrant general strike became the fundamental antecedent for a successful campaign against undeclared work launched in the countryside of Nardò (Apulia) in Summer 2010 and for the occupation of a 115 feet construction crane in Brescia (Lombardy) from 30 October to 16 November 2010, where migrants claimed their right to regularization. These four key struggles, on which this article will focus, gave direct inspiration to many other similar mobilizations throughout the whole country: in particular, acts of occupying public sites instead of work-places have continued for months, producing the occupation of two old industrial towers in Milan and of the dome of Massa, Tuscany. Some of those struggles, like the migrant general strike and the campaign against undeclared work, were repeated in 2011. Understanding migrants’ acts of citizenship Why did the tumult in Rosarno function as a turning point? How could it accelerate the processes of political subjectivation of migrants in Italy – also considering that those processes had already started in the 1990’s and that two similar tumults had already taken place in late 2008 in Castel Volturno and again in Rosarno? Does the aforementioned chain of mobilizations constitute a new ‘cycle of struggles’, distinct yet interrelated with the previous one? What are the most evident signals, the causes and the trends of this new cycle of struggles? How do these struggles and the specific acts performed by their protagonists contribute to deepen our understanding of citizenship, seen not as a given status or as an established entitlement to rights, but as a conflict on the meaning of “being political” (Isin, 2002), especially for subaltern and excludes Conference “Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship”, Milton Keynes, 06 – 07 February 2012 groups? How did these struggles contribute and how will they contribute to change migrants’ living conditions and the Italian society as a whole, opening the boundaries of citizenship? This article tries to answer to all these questions. The theoretical hypothesis leading my analysis is that contemporary migrant struggles, like those occurred in Italy in the last two years, are potentially re-configuring and re-inventing the very premises and conditions of being political. Traditionally intended as national and reserved to ‘qualified’ members of the State, the political space is actually under the pressure of many processes of “post-nationalisation” and “denationalization” (Sassen 2006). In this scenario, migrant struggles have a complex and partially contradictory relationship with citizenship: on one side, citizenship is contested as a nation-centred (Sayad 1996, 2004), differentiating (Isin 2002), stratifying and filtering machine (Santoro 2006), aimed at preserving the historical privileges of Western populations (Ferrajoli 1994); on the other side, citizenship becomes a ‘field of struggle’ for those who aim to re-negotiate its meanings and its borders, taking advantage of the open nature of citizenship as an “institution in flux” (Isin 2009) and as an “incomplete theorized contract” (Sassen 2006) between State and population. This hypothesis demands to break with several assumptions in citizenship studies, but also in migration and migrants mobilization studies. Citizenship studies traditionally focus on already established subjects, which belong to a given community and are entitled with a certain set of rights. Nevertheless, while usually addressing “extent (rules and norms of exclusion), content (rights and responsibilities) and depth (thickness or thinness)” of citizens, they “arrive too late” when there is at stake the “production” of those subjects (Isin 2008, p. 37). Isin’s “acts of citizenship” definitely offer the most suitable theoretical approach for exploring the unexplored, i.e. “the question of how subjects become claimants under surprising conditions or within a F. Oliveri relatively short period of time” (Isin 2008, p. 17): this question coincide perfectly with my own and will lead my efforts to understand the new cycle of migrant struggles in Italy. Once applied to empirical issues, like similar groundbreacking approaches, Isin’s theory will open room for further problematizations and conceptual articulations. I will formulate my propositions for re-framing the three “principles for investigating acts of citizenship” (Isin 2008, pp. 38–39) with the help of further critical thinkers (Foucault 1980, 2001, Gramsci 1995, Sayad 1996, 2004, Habermas 1996, Sousa Santos 2002). Against this theoretical background, migrant struggles in today Italy may clearly appear as being part of a new cycle of struggles, rooted in the crisis of neoliberalism, directed against its effects and potentially conducive to new alliances, including migrants and all the social forces interested in constructing a new social, economic and political model alternative to neoliberalism and to its disruptive and exclusionary citizenship. On one side, this perspective locates migrant struggles within the broader context of an analysis of the production of subjectivity and counter-subjectivity in the contemporary crisis of capitalism, according to the approach of “the autonomy of migration” and its suggestion to understand “the role played by mobility in the history and the contemporary reality of capitalism” (Mezzadra 2011, p. 122). On the other side, this perspective deliberately breaks with all the simplification and the undervaluation of migrants’ political agency typical of “methodological nationalism”, “neo- institutionalism”, “neoliberal multiculturalism” (Però and Solomos 2010), rejects the ethnicization of social conflicts and reaffirms the need to rethinking ‘class’ and ‘class politics’ in order to write the history of the present. From a cycle of struggles to another: migrants’ acts of citizenship as turning points Conference “Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship”, Milton Keynes, 06 – 07 February 2012 Italy as a laboratory for neoliberal governance of migrations Historically known as a country of emigration, Italy became a country of immigration in the 1980s. Today it is one of the largest immigration countries in the European Union in terms of net migration, having experienced an extremely rapid growth in the presence of migrants during the last 20 years. For instance, the share of migrant workers rose more than five times between 1991 and 2010, from 1.3 percent to 9 percent. The inflow of both documented and undocumented migrants is fuelled by the demand for low-skilled labour, the large informal and underground economy, the ageing population, the lack of a universal welfare system for elderly and disabled people, and the geographical condition as Europe’s southern border. There is also a growing number of family reunifications, even if under strict national and European regulations, and of children born in Italy. The North-South divide is generally reflected also in the distribution of migrants throughout the country. In particular in the North and in the Centre, migrants are relatively easily absorbed in industrial activity, services related to industry, commerce and building sector, while in the South they are mostly employed in agricultural and building sector. Many non-EU migrants, in particular women, work in the whole country as caretakers in private households, and as sex workers. Immigration has an ambivalent impact on Italian public opinion, which remains rather hostile towards migrants, while legislation has become increasingly restrictive and punitive. These apparent paradoxes, partially addressed by the recent literature as “the gap hypothesis” (Cornelius and Tsuda 2004, p. 4), respond to the specific features of the neoliberal governance of migrations. Contemporary discourses, policies and institutional practices in the field of migration and citizenship deserve the label of “neoliberal” because of the specific logic inspiring them. Not only the Market asserts its complete autonomy from State regulations and controls: it becomes “a kind of F. Oliveri permanent economic tribunal confronting government” (Foucault 2010, p. 247) and social life as a whole, claiming to measure actions in strictly economic terms. In relation to human mobility this approach produces a trend towards the radical commodification of migrants as pure labour-power: their rights to leave, to entry or to stay in a country depend preponderantly from their economic usefulness according to market rules. Moreover, by admitting migrants and expelling residents, a neoliberal State may select a population that is only made up of actors capable of operating in the market. The normal path that new migrants are required to take is therefore characterised by “a period of illegal residence and marginalisation during which individuals are tested. Only those who prove to be good citizens, that is, accept to live with no social security and no rights in totally precarious conditions, without causing any problems, are admitted to the rank of regulars, and are kept for a long time on the razor’s edge of short-term permits” (Santoro 2006, p. 286). Under neoliberalism, irregular immigration is not a policy failure, but an essential feature of the governance of human mobility: this seems also evident in the periodical recourse to mass regularisations. At the same time, most ‘democratic’ European citizens would never accept that access to rights might be governed by pure market rules, nor by more or less openly racist criteria of selection. Even the so-called “chauvinism of affluence” (Habermas 1996, p. 514), recommending to exclude migrants as far as possible from the welfare system because of shrinking financial resources, has an appeal only to minority rightoriented sectors of the society. Making the respect of legality and of national sovereignty the main criteria to access rights seems a more reasonable and acceptable position: one cannot develop solidarity with those who commit crimes and menace ‘our’ living spaces, ‘our’ cultural and physical integrity, etc. Constructing migrants as lawbreaking subjects makes them in many respects “suitable enemies” (Wacquant 1999) to Conference “Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship”, Milton Keynes, 06 – 07 February 2012 the present socio-economic and political order: they become not just a pool for disposable and cheap labour, but also an external entity against which fragmented and unequal Western societies can take a reunifying stand, while normalizing the legal creation of disadvantage subjects and destroying any solidarity towards them. Probably because it became a country of immigration when the idea of a oneworld market (of labour, too) and the neoliberal agenda were becoming established, Italy can be considered a living laboratory for this approach, even if institutional and administrative structures in the field remained underdeveloped, fragmented and highly inefficient compared to other EU countries. As in similar contexts, “the legal production of migrant illegality” (De Genova 2002) is principally an effect of the narrowing channels for regular access and permanence in the country. Together with the increasing stratification of migrant population and the growing criminalization of irregular migration, this is the result of an ongoing process of institutionalization experimenting a panoply of control mechanisms: Schengen visa rules, permits to stay subjected to a valid employment contract, yearly entry quotas, labour market tests, frequent regularization programmes subjected to varying criteria, administrative and penal sanctions against violations of immigration law, variable access to rights according to different statuses, i.e. to different kinds of permit, different lengths of staying, different categories of migrants, etc. (Nascimbene 2000, Pastore 2007, Santoro 2008). Those governmental experimentations, showing a certain similarity between centre-left and centre-right coalitions, have always produced resistances supported by anti-racist movements and new communist parties (Raimondi and Ricciardi 2004). The protest against the 189/2002 law, better known as the “Bossi-Fini law”, opened an intense cycle of struggles. This law abolished the job search visa and introduced an “individual application for recruitment” which employers must send to the Ministry of F. Oliveri Interior, selecting individual workers who are supposed to be outside of Italy. Above all, under the new law a stay permit could be granted only with a “work and residence contract”, and such contract was authorized only in case of proved shortage of national or EU workers and up to the ceiling of the yearly quota. Moreover, migrants had to leave the country if unemployed for six months. The first rally against this project of law took place on 19 July 2001, at the opening of the anti-G8 protests in Genoa: it was followed by many local demonstrations, converging in Rome on 19 January 2002 in a national rally. Under the influence of the local Social Forum, the first strike of migrant workers took place in Vicenza (Veneto) on 15 May 2002. These were “the germs of a new political centrality of migrant work in Italy, going beyond the rather defensive, solidarity-based antiracist mobilizations typical of the previous decade” (Cobbe and Grappi 2011, p. 63). Nevertheless, nothing really changed. Even when a centre-left coalition governed between 2006 and 2008, the Parliament didn’t find the courage to support the government in rewriting the Bossi-Fini law. Signals of acts of citizenship in the new cycle of migrant struggles Not surprisingly, between 2008 and 2010, the economic crisis had worse effects on migrant than on Italian workers (Bonifazi and Marini 2011). In fact, migrant work is traditionally used as a cyclical buffer aimed at maximizing profits by reducing the costs of production – first of all wages – and experimenting new forms of controlling, commodifying and exploiting work. This can especially happen in the grey or black areas of economy. Migrant workers usually are the first to be fired and then often rehired under irregular conditions. Above all, they live under the generalized threat of deportability, as they risk to loose the stay permit if they are unemployed for more than six months. Moreover, as happened for the economic and monetary policies, the crisis Conference “Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship”, Milton Keynes, 06 – 07 February 2012 of neoliberalism hasn’t produced any critique of the dominant model of migration policies: it encouraged rather their reiteration, in even more exasperated forms. As a matter of fact, the norms passed in 2009 by the new right-wing government in the socalled “Security package” classified the “irregular entry and stay in the country” as a criminal offence, rather than as a simple administrative irregularity. In case of other violations of the penal code, being undocumented was now considered as an aggravating circumstance. Undocumented migrants were liable to pay a fine of 10,000 euros and to be detained up to six months. People who knowingly housed them might face up to three years in prison. The initial proposition to deny access to public services – such as medical care and education – to undocumented migrants was taken back after heavy protests, including also doctors’ and teachers’. Together with the new restrictive laws, the government passed also an “amnesty” (sanatoria) only for domestic workers and care-takers. The uncertainty of the correct interpretation of the law resulted in thousands of rejected applications. According to an earlier decree, migrants who had already been expelled once for a no criminal offence could apply too. However, a later ministerial notice excluded this possibility. Meanwhile, a lot of migrants had already submitted their applications, paying a fee of 500 euro. Not only they were dropped from the procedure because of one last interpretation of the law, or because they produced false employment documents sold by swindlers: the applications became warrants the police could use in their search for unauthorized migrants. The economic crisis and the exasperated ‘war’ on irregular migration stimulated in 2010 a new cycle of struggles. The difference between this new cycle and the previous one can be found also in its peculiar political and subjective quality: the wave of protests started in Rosarno is characterized by an unprecedented production and diffusion of acts of citizenship. Such acts may be seen as turning points between the two F. Oliveri cycles of struggles and, at the same time, as one of the main element that the tumult in Rosarno, the migrant general strike on 1 March, the campaign against undeclared work in Nardò and the crane occupation in Brescia have in common. There are many signals that justify the use of Isin’s categories. Above all, migrants struggling in contemporary Italy enacted an unexpected rupture of the established political patterns, through acts of self-identification, self-organization and self-representation. Almost nobody in the country was ready to face tumults against everyday racist violence, mafia’s oppression or illegal recruiters’ over-exploitation. When the migrant general strike was announced, following the example of “A day without immigrants” organized in the United States and in France, only a few believed that it could be possible. Nobody had ever had the idea of a campaign denouncing systematic irregularities in the rural labour market, before migrants themselves launched it in Nardò with the support of two solidarity and anti-racist networks. No migrant had ever dared to enact such a radical act as occupying a construction crane in the centre of a city like Brescia, denouncing frauds during the amnesty and claiming “the right to stay for everyone”. It was unexpected that people living under the constant threat of being fired, attacked, over-exploited, criminalized or deported, could claim fundamental rights as workers and as human beings. In their claiming, migrants rejected the paternalistic approaches of trade unions, NGOs and political parties considering them unable of acting autonomously, because of their subaltern condition and their poor cultural and political resources. They demonstrated unsuspected self-organization, self-representation and alliance-building capacities. They enacted new political sites for struggles: not only in global cities, such as Milan, but also in small towns and in the countryside. They were successful in opening a new political scene, through the re-appropriation of classical practices of struggle, such as the strike. They made their voices heard and their bodies for everyone to see: they took Conference “Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship”, Milton Keynes, 06 – 07 February 2012 advantage of the media attraction for sensation in order to gain general attention, and they used blogs, independent radios, mobile phones, video and file sharing, in order to present their own stories without intermediaries. They were finally no longer “strangers” (stranieri), “non-EU people” (extra-comunitari) or “illegals” (clandestini): they gained individual identities, faces and names, instead of generic, abstract and prejudicial labels – this is exactly what happened to Arun, Papa, Sajad, Jimi, Rachid and Singh, the six occupants of the crane in Brescia. The explosive political potential of those events may be indirectly measured in the reactions they provoked in terms of solidaristic, antagonistic and alienating relationships (Isin 2008, p. 37). The mobilizations evoked a new kind of solidarity in the population, going beyond the militant milieus and involving also non politicised organizations and people. This was evident in Brescia, where the occupation of the crane was supported by a permanent sit-in around the construction site. The sit-in was created by anti-racist movements and neo-communist parties, but was also supported by the local Catholic Caritas, other volunteering groups and inhabitants of the neighbourhood, providing occupants with warm food and dry clothes. Solidarity was strongly political: significantly, one of the most widespread slogan of that time was “we are all on that crane”. On the other side, the mobilizations were generally repressed by police charges, deportations of the more active members of the movement, incrimination of militants of social centres (Piacentini 2011, pp. 31–33). The only exception was represented by the local government and the police in Nardò, who cooperated with the campaign against undeclared work. The mobilizations stimulated also the open and violent hostility of many far-right movements, which demanded the prohibition of all migrant manifestations in the country. The killing of two Senegalese workers in Florence on 13 December 2011 by a neo-fascist militant had apparently no F. Oliveri connection with the new cycle of migrant struggles: nevertheless, it may be considered as the result of a specific racist attitude, which deprecates migrant activism as a refusal of silenced subordination. The multiple dimensions of migrants’ acts of citizenship Isin’s theory has already been proved extremely useful in understanding contemporary migrant struggles (McNevin 2006, Nyers 2008). Nevertheless, there is the need for a systematic implementation of his principles of investigating acts of citizenship. With the help of those principles, I will interpret the multiple dimensions of migrants’ acts of citizenship in contemporary Italy, comparing the contexts and emphasizing the commonalities of the different mobilizations. I will also suggest how to integrate and rearticulate Isin’s categories, in order to better address some specificities of the new cycle of struggles. Migrants becoming political by activating ‘accumulated strengths’ According to Isin, the first principle of investigating acts of citizenship consists in observing how subjects become “activist citizens through the scene created” (Isin 2008, p. 38), i.e. through a new scene created by themselves and not inherited from others. The focus is on the self-constitution of an actor as political, recognizable as an equal claimant of rights and responsibilities within a certain political collectivity. Nevertheless, how can such a “political subjectivation” (Rancière 1999) be historically explained? What empirical conditions are needed to provide previously silenced and oppressed people with the capacity to act, to speak, to understand and change their own condition, i.e. “to make history” (Sassen 2006)? In relation to migrants living under neoliberal rules, this means first of all to clarify how they succeed in contesting and Conference “Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship”, Milton Keynes, 06 – 07 February 2012 subverting the dominant discourse of ‘democratic racism’, which blocks their capacity to act politically, maintains them in a subaltern position, and inhibits solidarity and alliances with other groups interested in political change. My answer to these questions is twofold: on one hand, one should focus not only on the ‘emergence’ of acts of citizenship as ruptures of the given, but also on their ‘descent’ in terms of every-day ‘accumulation of strengths’; on the other hand, one should detect the key experiences that provoke the ‘activation’ of this background. The background of migrant struggles in contemporary Italy consists in four different moments. First, as an effect of the crisis, some migrants fired in Northern factories went in the Southern countryside in order to get a job and maintain their right to stay (Mangano 2010, p. 71–72). Many of those migrants experienced struggles against the Bossi-Fini law and participated to the collective bargaining in the firms: maybe they used such “political knowledge” in Rosarno (Mometti and Ricciardi 2011, p. 13). Second, since the fall of 2008, the crisis produced large protests throughout the country: new social coalitions against austerity – including students, academic researchers, metal and mechanical workers – experimented new forms of protest, like blocks of streets and occupations of emblematic public sites. These struggles unified people on the basis of their common precarious conditions, and invested migrant workers too. Significantly enough, the occupation of the construction crane in Brescia was an involuntary emulation of another crane occupation by Italian workers in a closing factory. Those same workers send a solidarity message to the migrants on the crane: “Don’t be afraid of those unionists or politicians who attack you: they would do anything to put workers against workers. You have to resist. You are right. We are with you” (Piacentini 2011, p. 21). Third, this critical scenario activated memories of previous tumults (Mangano 2010, pp. 45–60), previous migrant strikes (Cobbe and F. Oliveri Grappi 2011, pp. 61–67) and previous occupations of public sites. Finally, migrant struggles are also the expression, not necessarily intentional, of the intrinsic political nature of migration. Without rhetoric or indue generalizations, the act of migrating can be seen as a “de facto attempt to act free” (Palidda 2008, p. 21). Moreover, migrations are perceived as a political challenge to “State thought” (Sayad 2004), according to which individuals exist on the international scene only as members of a Nation and, conversely, and States exist as long as they are able to make the distinction between nationals and non-nationals. Migrants becoming political by subverting ‘democratic racism’ A certain number of scholars argued that contemporary racism, in particular against migrants, can be surely qualified as “democratic” (Henry and Tator 2000, Faso 2008). Stressing its legal and administrative matrix, other scholars traditionally named this kind of racism “institutional” (Wieviorka 1995). In fact, one of the most shocking feature of this new racism is the capacity to develop reasonable discourses, apparently based on ‘matters of fact’ and on politically-correct postures, through which discriminations become de facto and de jure acceptable for a large share of the population, still believing in democratic and egalitarian values. The aforementioned legal production of migrants as ‘criminals’ lies at the core of a powerful ideological mechanism, functional to the neoliberal model of exclusionary citizenship: besides the crucial ‘criminalizing frame’, there are many other prejudicial discourses that depict migrants as a ‘menace’ or as a ‘resource’ in relation to the main interests of the receiving societies – security, well-fare and identity. The representation of migrants as ‘victims’ completes the picture: it contributes, at the same time, to patronize and depoliticize them and to offer a positive self-presentation of Western societies as “doing Conference “Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship”, Milton Keynes, 06 – 07 February 2012 good things for them” (Oliveri 2008, 2009). In their struggles in contemporary Italy migrants contested and subverted, in a more or less intentional way, the discourses of democratic racism. They rejected the prejudice of being outlaw by denouncing the many forms of illegality or irregularity widespread in the country and affecting them – and the large majority of Italians as well. In Rosarno they contributed to fight against underground economy and the local mafia. In the general strike, they denounced the mechanisms of the Bossi-Fini law and the disposition of the Security package as criminogenic. In Nardò they contested the practice of illegal intermediation in hiring (caporalato) typical of the rural economy in Southern Italian. In Brescia they denounced the frauds and abuses they suffered during the 2009 amnesty, revealing the existence of an underground market of fake documents and blaming the incongruence of the law. One of the aim of the migrant general strike was to reject the prejudice of being a ‘menace’ for the well-being of the Italian society: including also a buy boycott, the day without migrants demonstrated how the country largely depended on them working, paying taxes and spending money. At the same time, the political aim of the strike was to contest the subordination of migrants’ right to stay, and consequently of all other rights, to the fact of having a job: through this claim, migrants aimed at rejecting also the prejudice of being just a ‘resource’ with the connected neoliberal idea of ‘merit’ as the principal criterion for accessing rights. Finally, all those autonomous mobilizations subverted the image of migrants as ‘victims’, as passive recipients of ‘our’ policies or ‘our’ solidarity or as politically apathetic, willing to be satisfied with the little they get. According to the stories collected by Antonello Mangano (2010, p. 120) in Rosarno, many migrants have a clear political consciousness about their being exploited and are not resigned about it: “the boss don’t pay me because I’m clandestino”, “for the money they pay to us, we’d better F. Oliveri not go to work at all and leave all the fruits on the trees”. Migrants becoming answerable to ‘truth’ against hypocrisy Many evidences show that migrant struggles in contemporary Italy generally produced a solidaristic attitude in the public opinion, especially in other workers or social categories which were experiencing a growing precariousness as an effect of the crisis and the austerity measures adopted by the government. This result could be theoretically understandable as a construction of a new ‘we-ness’, even as an embryonal process of ‘class recomposition’ going beyond nationalist/racist fractures. Despite being only partially intentional, this result should be considered one of the most important outcomes of the new cycle of struggles. This happened because migrants acted as citizens and thus produced themselves as “actors that become answerable to justice against injustice” (Isin 2008, p. 39). But what exactly allowed to establish a link between solidarity and justice? Is it something different from the readiness of the interpreters to “always interpret how acts of citizenship orient themselves towards justice”, according to Isin’s second principle of theorizing acts of citizenship? I argue that this principle should be re-formulated and should integrate a certain idea of ‘truth’ linking solidarity and justice. Citizenship acts may be interpreted as justice-driven and thus as producing solidarity across fragmented and originally opposed groups, only if they are also oriented toward the creation of a new “regime of truth” (Foucault 1980) and of a new “hegemony” (Gramsci 1995). In fact, through a “battle for truth – not for some absolute truth but for the rules according to which the true and false are separated and specific effects of power are attached to the true” (Foucault 1980) –, it is possible to re-frame social alliances and antagonisms and to justify them in terms of justice against injustice. Conference “Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship”, Milton Keynes, 06 – 07 February 2012 In particular, I suggest to interpret migrant struggles in contemporary Italy as involving acts of “fearless speech” (Foucault 2001), which create migrants as actors answerable to truth against hypocrisy. Denouncing hypocrisy as functional to the dominant economic and political system, migrants speak of their unjust conditions and of the unjust functioning of Italian society at the same time: they politically activate the “mirror-function” typical of migrations i.e. their power to single out what is latent in the political order of the destination society, “thus unmasking what is masked, revealing what should be ignored (…), shedding some light or enlarging what is usually hidden into the social unconscious and therefore is destined to be kept in the shadow, as a secret” (Sayad 1996). For instance, the tumult of Rosarno revealed to a large audience what many militants, journalists and professionals already knew: our Christmas oranges were, in reality, the “fruits of hypocrisy” (Medici senza frontiere 2005). Migrants brought to the public debate the unsustainable functioning of the rural economy in Southern Italy, where competitiveness and profit have been based more and more on low salaries, over-exploitation and criminalization of migrant workers, and often also on subsidy frauds against the European Community. These arguments became central in the campaign against work in Nardò, where migrants succeeded in denouncing at the same time their inhuman working conditions and the collective damages of underground economy, asking the respect of worker rights in general and of minimum wage rules in particular. During their general strike, migrants denounced the Bossi-Fini law as a labour-market law, aimed at blackmailing migrant workers while at the same time exposing Italian workers to the social dumping on salaries, working hours, working conditions, etc. They contested as a pure hypocrisy the discourse of a ‘natural’ competition between workers, as this was artificially created by immigration laws and by the non-application of general rules for decent work. They argued therefore that the F. Oliveri abolition of a strict link between work and permit to stay were a “common struggle of all workers living in the country”. Migrants proving their claims as legitimate trough legal self-critical mechanisms In order to really modify their social and political conditions, migrants have to interact with the law as the fundamental normative structure of modern power. Isin affirms that “acts of citizenship do not need to be founded in law or enacted in the name of law” (Isin 2008, p. 39) and that they may even break the given legal framework. This principle is theoretically valid, but I wonder if a generic reference to ‘law’ may be misleading: what kind of law(s) is here at stake? Why should the right to claim rights and responsibilities be “due” (Isin and Nielsen 2008, p. 2) to actors enacting themselves as citizens? Is there any special normativity that may obligate public authorities, enterprises and political communities to recognize such a pretension, transcending the existing laws? I argue that, in our secularized and democratic states of law, legal provisions are legitimate and thus able to ensure social integrity if the principle of selflegislation is implemented. According to this principle, “the addressees of the law must also be able to understand themselves as its authors” and “the substance of human rights resides in the formal conditions for the legal institutionalization of those discursive processes of opinion- and will-formation” (Habermas 1996, p. 120) in which the principle of self-legislation assumes a binding character. Evidently, the present legal situation of migrants as addressees only of ‘our’ laws, potentially deportable and deprivable of all rights, is not conform to this principle. At the same time, as modern legal systems are sensible to critics raised on the base of their own principles, it is possible to denounce the democratic non-conformity of migrant status and contest the legitimacy of the State discretionary powers on borders. Acts of citizenship may be thus Conference “Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship”, Milton Keynes, 06 – 07 February 2012 investigated as those acts that constitute actors as legitimate claimants of rights and responsibility in the name of democratic law’s self-criticism. As activist citizens, migrants in contemporary Italy activated self-critical mechanisms of democratic law. Their acts may be considered as examples in Western countries of what Boaventura De Sousa Santos calls a “subaltern cosmopolitan legality” (De Sousa Santos 2002), focussing on grass-root, informal, contentious strategies trying to use the law for emancipation. During the tumult in Rosarno, migrants initially evoked their being humans – “we are not animals”, “we are persons like you are” – in order to be recognised as legitimate claimants of rights. They also asked how Italians could tolerate such a “shame for humanity”. One of them denounced the inconsistency of Europe’s self-image as a rights-based society: “It’s bullshit, this Europe”. The ethnic cleansing ordered by the Minister of Interior made any legal action impossible. The mobilization in the countryside of Nardò was centred on these kinds of action: the claim of a regular recruitment contract (ingaggio) and the menace not to work without it were used by migrants to improve everyone’s rights under the existing laws. This campaign against undeclared work can be considered an example of ‘civil obedience’, claiming the respect of some basic human rights – like the right to eat, to drink, to rest, to be fairly and regularly paid, to receive legal support, etc. – in the light of international conventions and of the national contract for rural workers. Mobilizations in Brescia didn’t stop after migrants got off the crane: they accessed legal remedies to contest the ministerial note excluding previously expelled migrants from the 2009 amnesty. On 10 May 2011 the High Administrative Court finally ruled in their favour, recognizing the legality of their applications. A further legal action is still open, asking for the regularization of all the victims of frauds. F. Oliveri Conclusions: a new cycle of struggles opening the boundaries of citizenship As a matter of fact, two years after the tumult the situation in Rosarno has not improved. If it is possible, it has become even worse: migrants’ previous shelters were destroyed by the police and no safer housing conditions were provided instead by local authorities (Candito 2012). Therefore migrant struggles in contemporary Italy should not be overestimated, especially in relationship with their immediate results, in terms of advances in people’s material and legal conditions. Bearing this in mind, it is crucial to stress the role that acts of citizenship had in the political quality of the mobilizations. Stimulated by the economic crisis and its effects, also in terms of a ‘war’ against irregular migration, these acts signal the beginning of a new, unexpected and creative cycle of migrant struggles in Italy. The general political impact of these struggles is still difficult to assess, but some trends are already clear now. First, migrants contributed to challenge the discourses of democratic racism, trying to tell a counter-narrative about migrations under neoliberal rules based on their direct experiences and feelings. The acceptability of democraticallycorrect racism, depicting migrants only as ‘menace’, as ‘resource’ or as ‘victims’, is a pillar of the neoliberal model of an exclusionary citizenship based on market-oriented merits: migrants acting as activist citizens against it produced therefore a significant opening of the current boundaries of citizenship, which all the subalterns and the supporters of an inclusive model of citizenship may take advantage from. Second, migrant struggles created a new kind of solidarity, based not on anti-racist militancy or on humanitarian feelings, but on an emerging new ‘regime of truth’. This enabled a process of class recomposition, including all workers and other social categories united against the crisis and its effects. Becoming answerable to ‘truth’ against the hypocrisy of a social system, which exploit migrants and oppose ‘them’ to ‘us’, they became Conference “Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship”, Milton Keynes, 06 – 07 February 2012 answerable to justice against injustice too. Migrants contributed therefore to open the neoliberal boundaries of a competitive and ‘racialized’ citizenship in the name of an alternative model, based on cooperation and re-appropriation of the collective life. Third, migrant struggles revealed the structural contradictions of contemporary democratic states of law: acting as citizens, they contested they role of mere addressees of legal measures, without any formal possibility of being part of their deliberation and implementation. Migrants implicitly defended the democratic principle of selflegislation and proved that their claims of rights and responsibilities were well founded, activating self-critical mechanisms of democratic law against the existing neoliberal governance of migration. They contributed therefore to open the boundaries of the present post-democratic citizenship, recalling to everyone the danger of being extorted of any real democracy under market rules. References Arendt, H. (1973) On Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Bonifazi, C. and Marini, C. (2011) Il lavoro degli stranieri in tempo di crisi, lavoce.info, 11 May. Available from: http://www.lavoce.info/articoli/pagina1002301.html [Accessed on 10 January 2012]. 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