Looking for the Best and Brightest? Deservingness Regimes in Italian Labour Migration Management

Abstract

It is often maintained that contemporary foreign labour recruitment programs have taken an increasingly selective stance and that skills are increasingly crucial in granting migrants easier access and stronger welfare and residency rights in receiving countries. The paper provides a retrospective account of the evolution of Italian labour migration management, paying attention to the changing selection criteria reflected in some of its “front, back and side doors”. It will be shown that Italian labour migration management is increasingly embracing a bifurcated regime of deservingness. Despite some recent tentative signs of change towards an increased evaluation of high skills as a selection principle embedded into a competitiveness‐driven frame, over the last decades labour migration management has been largely dominated by the recruitment of a low‐skilled workforce. The paper discusses the emergence of a specific construction migrants’ deservingness placing Italy in a peculiar position in a European context.

“We Cannot Let Them Die”: Undocumented Immigrants and Media Framing of Health Deservingness in the United States

“…Rather than universal access, the principle of deservingness points to certain alleged characteristics (e.g., being young, innocent, or weak) as the sine qua non conditions for receiving publicly funded social welfare and health benefits. This approach is aligned with a growing literature in the field of immigrant deservingness, which has explored the paths to inclusion of undocumented immigrantsalong with other disenfranchised ethnic minorities-into the welfare state of developed nations (Bonizzoni, 2018;Chase, Cleveland, Beatson, & Rousseau, 2017;Chauvin & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2014;Holmes & Castañeda, 2016;Kootstra, 2016).…”

Social Class, Migration Policy and Migrant Strategies: An Introduction

“…These selection mechanisms are almost invariably based not on applicants’ merits but on how they would benefit the receiving society, following the logic that Alain Morice named “migratory utilitarianism” (Morice, ). In some instances, specific skills are required based on diagnosed sectoral shortages, which can advantage lesser skilled groups, such as working‐class women in domestic work (Bonizzoni [], this issue), even though domestic workers represent a small minority of migrant women worldwide (Spiritu, ). In many other cases, selection is based on diploma level or on expected salary, with the paradox that migrants whose highly‐paid labour will cost the receiving economy a great deal of money are framed as gains, while those whose low‐wage work will cost the same economy very little are framed as costly.…”

“…Reintroducing class in the study of immigration and integration policies thus allows one to break with implicit imaginaries of destination societies as homogeneously middle‐class, by showing how class‐inflected “cultural” and “economic” criteria of entry, legalisation, and naturalisation based on these imaginaries contribute to (re)producing a stratified social structure, even as it reveals that policies do not always uniformly favour the higher‐skilled (see Bonizzoni in this issue). This approach also brings to light that income and cultural requirements function both as selection devices and as disciplining tools.…”

“…Gender complicates the assessment of international migrants’ class identities. For example, it structures the differential construction of skills for men and women by deskilling the recruitment channels of female labour migrants (Docquier et al., ; Kofman, ), which may also create avenues for certain streams of unskilled female migration (Bonizzoni [] in this issue). Classed conceptions of masculinity shape the motivations and modalities of men's migrations in crucial ways (Sinatti, ; Prothmann, in this issue).…”

“…Paola Bonizzoni () shows that in Italy, too, economic desirability is classed, but does not benefit the highly skilled. She recognizes that the valorization of highly skilled migrants is the rule in most national cases.…”