Politiche escludenti e associazionismo immigrato in una banglatown del Nordest: il caso di Alte Ceccato

Abstract

IntroduzioneCon l'entrata in vigore delle L.125/08 e 94/09 viene introdotto in Italia il cosiddetto "Pacchetto sicurezza" che attribuisce ai sindaci, in qualità di "ufficiali di governo" nuovi poteri "volti a prevenire ed eliminare gravi pericoli che minacciano l'incolumità pubblica e la sicurezza urbana e che possono condurre all'adozione, con atto motivato, di ordinanze contingibili e urgenti nel rispetto dei principi generali dell'ordinamento".In una cornice di crescente razzismo (Basso, 2010) ciò si è tradotto in un numerosi provvedimenti comunali contro gli immigrati. Solo tra il luglio 2008 e l'agosto 2009 nel Nord Italia ne sono stati emessi 788 (Perocco, 2010). I Comuni coinvolti sembrano essere concentrati prevalentemente in Lombardia,

Times of Work and Social Life: Bangladeshi Migrants in Northeast Italy and London

“…During the 1980s and 1990s, Bangladeshi migrants to Italy were heavily concentrated in Rome, where they worked in the city’s extensive informal economy as street-hawkers or in catering and other tourism-related services (Knights and King 1998). Subsequently, having obtained legal residence through one of Italy’s amnesties, migrants dispersed to other parts of the country, especially the prosperous northeast, where they found factory work and affordable housing and created their own “bangla-towns” (Della Puppa and Gelati 2015). By 2016, the Bangladeshi community in Italy had grown to 122,400, with major concentrations in Rome and the Veneto region (Centro Studi e Ricerche IDOS 2017).…”

“…In these small and medium-sized industrial settlements, which ranged from just a few thousand to around 30,000 inhabitants, social classes and ethnic groups were mixed together. As Della Puppa and Gelati’s (2015) ethnography of one such town demonstrates, the population as a whole had a strong sense of local attachment that favored participation in civic, cultural, and religious events, as well as small-scale spontaneous daily interactions in the street, at the entrance to houses and blocks of flats, in schools, and in public offices. Below, Rafik (interviewed in London), perhaps with nostalgia for those years, remembered his years living in an Italian village of around 4,000 people where, inevitably, people “know each other”:There, I had lots of Italian friends: people who worked with me, but we were not just work colleagues, they were friends.…”

“…From participants’ narratives, it seemed that they achieved a somewhat ambivalent integration in Italy: structurally confined to factory work (and elsewhere in Italy, to activities such as street-hawking, agricultural labor, and restaurant work) with little opportunity for upward occupational mobility yet at the micro level, despite nativist local politics and widespread “anti-migrant feelings” (Ambrosini 2013; Della Puppa and Gelati 2015), accepted and welcomed by workmates and neighbors. From the many stories of friendship, help, and neighborliness that we collected, here is one that powerfully shows Italians’ warm reception of Bangladeshi workers and their families in these small urban centers.…”

“…Moreover, it is also around the perimeters of the squares and parks, used as meeting places by Bangladeshi families, that Bangladeshi-run commercial activities spring up. This concentration of small ethnic businesses and the polysemous use of these urban micro-spaces can be traced to the functions and layout of villages and small towns in Bangladesh (Della Puppa and Gelati 2015). These parks, squares, and sidewalks in front of the shops and cafés run by Bangladeshi families in Italy became hubs for exchange of information about jobs, decision-making, political discussion, and idle chit-chat—albeit mainly for men.…”

“…Male migrants moved from the regulated working conditions of northeast Italy’s Fordist industrial complex and post-Fordist subcontracting small factory units (Dunford and Greco 2006) to London’s highly deregulated labor market and low-wage tertiary sector linked to strong occupational polarization and the “new migrant division of labor” (Wills et al 2010). The second issue we address compares and contrasts the spatiality of daily life for migrant Bangladeshi men in the “diffuse urbanization” of small towns and industrial villages in northeast Italy (Della Puppa and Gelati 2015) with London’s sprawling mega-region as a “global city” (Sassen 1991). Third and finally, we address the differentiated impact of migration and its temporalities with respect to inter-generational prospects, reflecting the fact that onward migration may be motivated not so much by immediate gains for first-generation migrants but by the future life-chances of the second generation.…”