Migrations, power and urban spaces in Sicily through an ethnographic case study

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Migrations, power and urban spaces in Sicily through an ethnographic case study

D. Settineri

Abstract

In this article, the author, based on concrete factual material, explores the specifics of modern migration processes considered within an urban area localized in Palermo (Sicily). In the context of this complex heterotopic space, resorting to the conceptual apparatus of M. Foucault, this kind of rhizome, if we operate with the concepts of J. Deleuze and F. Guattari, the author analyzes the actions of various actors of power - local and transnational - which dominate in this closed sociourban environment, outlined by the framework of certain city blocks, - formal and informal, institutionalized and not, state and extra-state, legal and illegal, political, social, ecclesiastical, economic, criminal, the objects of projection and manifestation of which are migrants (primarily illegal) concentrated in these urban areas, who coexist there with the local population. The author also studies reactions of "newcomers" to the factors that affect them, including their ways of understanding and familiarizing with of their new place of residence as a micro- and the macrocosm, in all the diversity and complexity of the social connections that permeate this habitat and the factors that affect it.

Key words: Palermo, migration, violence, State, mafia, transnational, heterotopia, space, law, justice

Сеттинери Дария

Миграции, власть и городские пространства в Сицилии: этнографическое исследование

В статье на основе полевого фактического материала исследуется специфика современных миграционных процессов, которые рассматриваются автором в рамках одного конкретного городского ареала, локализованного в г. Палермо (Сицилия). В контексте этого сложного гетеротопического пространства,, прибегая к понятийному аппарату М. Фуко, своеобразной ризомы, оперируя концептами Ж. Делеза и Ф. Гваттари, анализируются в первую очередь действия различных акторов власти, местных и транснациональных, довлеющих в этой очерченной рамками определенных кварталов города, замкнутой социально-урбанистической среде, - формальных и неформальных, институционализированных и нет, государственных и внегосу- дарственных, легальных и нелегальных, политических, социальных, экклесиальных, экономических, криминальных, объектами защиты и внимания которых являются мигранты, в первую очередь нелегальные, сконцентрированные в этих городских кварталах и сосуществующие там с местным населением. Также исследуется реакция "пришлых" на воздействующие на них факторы, в том числе внимание акцентируется на способах освоения и осмысления нового места обитания как микро- и макрокосма, во всем многообразии и сложностях пронизывающих мигрантское сообщество социальных связей.

Ключевые слова: Палермо, миграция, насилие, государство, мафия, транснациональный, гетеротопия, пространство, права, правосудие

"The world in 15 square metres!" Youssou was almost right. There were eight or nine of us in Bej's tiny studio flat on the first floor of a building in vicolo Madonna, in the area of Ballard (Palermo), on that Ramadan day to break the fast together: we represented four continents, several countries and religions. The contrast between the warm drink made of milk powder and coffee, with which we were breaking the fast, and the air moved by the fan blades facing me and two other people made the sultry heat of that late July evening more bearable for us three lucky ones. Outside there was no breath of wind and the humidity ratio was very high. We spent some peaceful hours with fun intervals. In particular, a Hungarian girl and I had recently started studying Wolof and our clumsy attempts to demonstrate our language skills made the three Senegalese there laugh out loud. There was also another Hungarian girl, a Korean girl, a Canadian boy and a Ghanaian one. миграционный власть транснациональный

That evening seems to me to condense many of the thoughts developed in this article, in which I propose some considerations on the connections between migration policies, the representation of the nation state and social vulnerability reflecting on the ethnographic research I led at "Ballard", Palermo's historic market located in the second of the four districts into which the city's historic centre is divided: the "Albergheria", in the area of the central station. Frequently, however, the actual location of some space in a given part of the urban fabric is not enough to locate the space itself because the perception that one has of it can be declined in many ways. Therefore, it is crucial to try and understand whether it is possible to trace paradigms of perception and, if so, to understand which social agents these models express. Auge argues that "the city has always had a temporal existence, which goes beyond the spatial existence giving it prominence" (Auge 2007: 74). A few pages later he adds that "[...] it represents the political form of the future [...] is both an illusion and an allusion" (ibid 2007: 76).

I believe that we can speak of polymorphic spaces which, depending on the type of interaction that prevails each time, can become models of relationships within which a system of correspondences between the micro-social dimension and that of institutional policies is delineated; therefore, the centrality of the encounter in the constitution of a place is fundamental, but a social space can also become the site of conflicts transforming itself from polymorphic to "dysmorphic" or morphologically altered to the point of creating a structural modification of the relationships that affect it. A portion of territory agitated by tensions of different nature (economic, social, emotional) at the same time can become a space as polymorphic or dysmorphic. The history and topicality of Ballard's market can be read starting from these directions. The premise must be not to frame the chronicles of violence of which the neighborhood is often the scene into prejudices, but to look for deeper reasons, and these refer to psychological as well as a social issues, universal as well as situational ones. In this territory, violence proves to be one of the results of the interconnection between spaces, power and movement.

The years from the end of World War II to the present day, in fact, with a few exceptions, are years in which the administrative political chasm in the area of the historical centre has allowed the creation of this condition of marginality. The historical centre has been the weakest link in the political and administrative reorganization from the post-war period to the present day, with the almost total exclusion from any territorial policy until the 1990s, which was due to the greatest building speculation in Sicilian history: this occurred mainly in the twenty years between 1950 and 1970 and was promoted by the collusion between politicians and the mafia. Among the specific factors of Ballard, we have to remark that the decentralization of the market with respect to the heart of the old city made Ballard even less permeable to municipal policies and, due to the fact that it is located on the edge of the central station, more sensitive to the gravitational energies of the new multiple centralities of the expanding city.

At the beginning of the 1980s, the district presented itself as a place with a low housing rate and as an important hub of informal economic activities or activities managed by organized crime and, close to the central station, in a strategic position for the placement of the protagonists of the first waves of migration. The continuation of the dominion of the bombing wing of the Corleone mafia made it, furthermore, the scene of frequent "settlements of accounts". Still between the eighties and nineties, the neighborhood responded to that collective imagination for which it became the suitable setting for the neo-realist cinema of social denunciation. However, much more happened in those years in Ballard: the social structure was changing and with it some strategies of control of the territory slowly changed as well.

Until 1990, no entry visa from Tunisia was needed and both the political and financial macro-relationships and the economic micro-relations between the two countries were flourishing (see Wulzer 2011) and, in fact, in those years there was a strong influx of North African migrants who settled in Palermo and in Ballard in particular. From the midnineties, however, the stream of migrants from the sub-Saharan area began to intensify; at the end of the nineties there were the first sporadic renovations of the interiors of some noble palaces with the consequent transfer of some radical chic fringes that opened the way, in fact, to the current complex process of gentrification of the historic centre. Making use of Guattari's analysis on the molar-molecular pair (Guattari 2010: 285), one could say that Ballard is a space of action/reaction and of articulation between stratified or molar orders and orders of flows, transitions, intensity, or molecular orders. Molar and molecular, in fact, are two connected poles of the same fulcrum so that one does not transform into the other by differential but by communication and propagation; they are "being" and "becoming" to the extent that one contains the other. It is the logic of the object and the flow; molar is ice before it becomes water, which is molecular until it solidifies into ice.

Therefore, molarity can be traced back to the adherence to sense matrices, molarity to escape lines, to variables. It is unthinkable that one level of the couple can act without the authorization of the other and precisely for this reason Ballard becomes the real arena of the ways in which, for its ability to be simultaneously molar and molecular, the state, political, judicial, criminal, mafia, familiar powers can be articulated and, at the same time, escaped. The Albergheria and Ballard can rise to models of the creation of contexts of marginality and their management. The existence downgraded to survival and the impossibility of planning become the extremes within which the inhabitants of Ballard frequently build their networks and lead their lives. A system of this kind contributes to the formation of large families because it is based on the exploitation of the workforce, given the high school dropout rate from an early age.

But, in the wake of Guattari and using the Foucaultian suggestion on heterotopia (Foucault 1994), Ballard also represents the paradigm of the complexity of interstitial spaces because in this territory we can find at the same time the expected outcomes of certain political, social, ecclesial, economic and criminal logics and the conditions of complexity that overturn any hypothesis of reading the spaces, making the place itself the space of an autonomous project in which the agency of the historical inhabitants, as well as that of the new ones, allows multiple, complex and contradictory readings of the same events. Although this is a space in which administrative failures can be read in the streets, incorporated in the gutting of buildings, declined in the everyday problems, at the same time, the practices of everyday life of students, new inhabitants, volunteers, migrants and democratic policies born from below and partially accepted by the municipal administration in recent years, have built different networks, changed economic strategies, negotiated new spaces of sociality and, certainly, they have imposed on crime new forms of land management making the territory itself a laboratory of active and participatory citizenship; this practice, paradoxically, cannot always be institutionalized because it is operated by a large number of people who do not have documents: sans papiers migrants.

Ballard includes a plurality of levels of transnational organization (for example associations, places of socialization, informal mechanisms for sending remittances, methods for remote healing) that act in the determination of the territory. These levels of organization combine different instances; they are not territorially located but are the immediate result of interactions between human beings and, in some cases, they also travel on virtual networks. The migratory experience, as an experience of emigration and immigration at the same time, has effects on several levels both on the society of departure and on the relationships that the emigrants maintain in the place of origin and on the perception of their new home that they manage to convey by producing new forms of imagination. A person who experiences migration is able to produce new places, to redefine the space, to create networks, to make the local and global coincide to the extent that it outlines a system of correspondences between microcosms and macrocosms.

Because of its history, Ballard is one of those places that acts as a catalyst for the action of multiple forms of governance and their influence and confluence. It is a complex and multifaceted reality in which the fate ofthousands of men and women without residence permits is at stake as they manage to find a living space in this area. This happens because, although held in a vice, for the state, in Ballard they exist as subjects liable to criminal prosecution for the illegality of their presence, and for the criminal agencies they are there as subjects that can be blackmailed because of their social and legal vulnerability (Settineri 2013: 108), these men and women become a reservoir from which to draw manpower, precisely because of the plurality of power levels that shape the neighborhood; because of the supremacy of the criminal one (albeit with the silent placet of the official one) the control over the presence by the police is less suffocating and, in fact, particularly after the establishment of the crime of clandestinity (2009), many migrants who lived in northern Italy decided to move to Palermo.

Thus, a system of correspondence between the microsocial dimension and that of institutional policies is outlined. Lately in the European context, we have observed a mode of governance inspired by the dynamics of division between political choices and consequence management, as if the latter were not the logical outcome of the former. We could define this strategy as the "art of disconnection", since it has the ability to break down the chain of orders that underlies the cause-possible effect relationship, attributing fatal characteristics to consequentiality. This entails a sort of schizophrenia of public political representations since all the connections between rhetoric concerning the level of political, military or social actions and the levels of reactions are eluded. The latter, on the contrary, approached as self-generating events, are treated by governance agencies as independent phenomena on which to act, creating, this time, steered connections.

Among these, one of the most common is the one that relates the economic and value crisis in Europe to today's migratory movements, while keeping silent about the fact that migration, which in itself is an innate experience of humankind, is often linked precisely to past and present European imperialist policies. Overturning the logic of disconnection, Achille Mbembe (2010) highlights the relationship between political processes in Africa and political economy, the imaginary of power, neo-liberalist economic constraints. The intersection of these aspects leads to the formation of pockets of discarded humanity (Baumann 2003). Neoliberalism is much more connected to the political sphere than liberalism was, with the consequence that the economic and political management of power is today linked to the management of human beings themselves. Aihwa Ong (2006) argues that neoliberalism is a set of flexible practices of governance which acts both on a global scale, in the management of economic flows, and on the national territory, with differentiated governance techniques. This implies a differential access to resources for which there are fringes of humanity, for whom access to the set of social and political rights, within the territory, is particularly difficult.

In his story, Karim, a Ghanaian boy with whom I had a conversation in March 2014, insists a lot on his fragility and on the connection between his condition as an illegal immigrant and the difficulty of managing his presence on the territory irrespective of criminal agencies. In Ballard, the management of time and space, body techniques and social relations are pervaded by the assumption of living in the shadow zone between several powers. From Karim's few comments, one can already understand the fact that clandestinity is a totalizing condition, which involves every aspect of life, but also the fact that in Ballard, precisely, this condition is exploited by criminal agencies:

[...] When I arrived, I couldnt refuse to be a body packer A body packer is a person who swallows containers filled with drugs so that this is not found by the police. The translation of the interview is mine.. Two of my friends died during the journey [...] I was terrified. I thought I had a bomb in my belly that could explode at any time. And I was also afraid of being discovered. [...] But dont think the police are so good, they didn't understand anything about this. They only stop us if they have a tip-off. We tip-off to the police between us, to steal each other's work. I even went far [...] I had others doing it for me [...]

Karim stopped his "job" as a body packer when he managed to become essential in the recruitment of new subjects because he was able to obtain a subcontract that did not require his participation in the journeys, but allowed him to manage the movements of other countrymen in exchange for a quantity (proportional to that transported) of drug containers he could sell. When he managed to obtain his residence permit and was therefore able to negotiate his presence with the state agencies, he decided to stop this activity. The decision to emancipate himself from the drug circuit, however, also meant that he had to leave Palermo because of the possible retaliation that he might face. Over the years, Karim had acquired a certain importance within the world of drug dealing and, consequently, he had a certain knowledge of the dynamics of the neighbourhood. His decision exposed him to retaliation which could have put his life at risk. He was not so much afraid of being accused of being unreliable, because he had stopped doing this job, or of being seen as "ungrateful", but rather of being the bearer of the secrets on an activity of which he was no longer a part and of which he could have revealed the goings-on.

This type of emancipation is quite unlikely to take place until one is a clandestine and so is excluded from the circuits of legality, but it is possible when one has residence permits. The processes of exclusion of the most vulnerable subjects from the possibility of participating in political life implement new forms of exclusion that reveal the fallacy of a system that promotes institutional procedures and liberal democratic values, according to the best rhetorical traditions of pluralist democracies. The fracture between formal and substantive accessibility to the law is the disconnection that must hide the schizophrenia that many social groups deal with on a daily basis.

Among other things, the fact that people tend to polarize geographically (Davies 2008) has the consequence that there is a growing rift, made up of ignorance about other people's conditions, between subjects coming from different social conditions. And, indeed, in a world where, thanks to access to information, it would be easily possible to try and understand the public dynamics that lead to situations of global and local social injustice, it is complicated to understand why there is a lack of interest in understanding the conditions in which our fellow human beings find themselves, as well as the reasons for this indifference. Yet this is how it is: great narratives have enormous poietic power and, if they are not constantly watched over, it is easy to give them space to colonize the human imagination in this field too.

Thus, one finds oneself, on the one hand, supporting the campaigns promoted by the various NGOs in favour of humanitarian projects, in the name of the social-democratic values that Westerners have historically guaranteed (albeit with frequent amnesia), on the other hand, refusing to share the set of rights established by the state with the people who live, or would like to live, in the same territory. And this happens because of an intrinsic belief that the social privileges some enjoy belong to them as inalienable rights and not because of fate that made some live in a specific time and society rather than in other times and societies.

On October 3, 2013, one of the many boats attempting to cross the sea was shipwrecked and the sea swallowed up 366 human beings: as a consequence, the Italian government decided to give the Italian citizenship to the victims who also received solemn funerals, while those who lived, those who had survived the tragedy, were automatically charged with the crime of illegal immigration. A feel-good rhetoric freeing from the blame was used when dealing with the dead; while no similar observations were made on the living, on those who could have really benefited from the acquisition of citizenship: the migrants that survive the sea passage are useful if they stay illegal, held in a centre, vulnerable and exploitable because all of these conditions represent a business for both the formal and informal economy.

Human misfits are needed, but this consideration must be silenced. A double-track, a perfect expression of common feeling: what some must be guaranteed as a right, others can be granted as a privilege. A real differential form of access to resources which, however, thanks to a good dose of rhetoric, is camouflaged by the democratic states of Europe. And so, for example, the focus is on rescue operations at sea, their benefits and their social cost, and not on the fact that there is a part of the world free to travel everywhere and a part to which this possibility is not granted. And this without wanting to further examine the analytical data that would show what are the political and economic motivations that push towards these diasporas, the historical and current responsibilities of governments; the benefits, in economic terms, of illegal migration that produces vulnerable, blackmailable, exploitable human beings in several sectors, from labour at no cost to prostitution, from drug trafficking to organ trafficking.

This is the ability to create disconnections, to relegate critical consumption to the niche, to forget the dramas of labour exploitation in our agriculture or building, to break the chain between arms-producing countries and their clandestine trade, to make the dead in shipwrecks and the living in detention centres just numbers, as well as the girls who prostitute themselves on our sidewalks and those who look after our homes, elderly, children. It is also necessary to create new nodes of coincidence, bringing new centres of significance (Deleuze, Guattari 2010: 191), in order to recover the moment of the short-circuit, when the chain cause-possible effects is broken, and to reconnect the relationship between economy, power and human misfits, at a macro-social level as well as in daily practices. The rhetoric of the crisis leads to the management/exploitation of labour. In the name of the crisis more people can be exploited and more exploitable human beings can be found.

Today we focus on the imperium ofthe crisis. The concept ofimperium, although historically responding to gradually different representations of power, has always included an aspect of contiguity with the ability and opportunity to act for the management of people and space. The management of the crisis, involving emergency measures, depoliticizes the public space and makes human beings much more exposed to violence than policies of security and social differentiation. One could go so far as to argue that the capitalist accumulation of power, as well as the economic one, is also an accumulation by "dispossession". Dispossession of humanity. It lives on the claim of essentialisation by those who act also thanks to the bureaucratic apparatus that provides for the implementation of forms of de-humanisation.

Until 1986 the Italian law only knew "foreign" workers whose employment was regulated by provisions dating back to the immediate post-war period. From that year, however, the political and legal management of the presence of migrants was subject to increasingly restrictive regulations, based on the principle of emergency and amnesty, until the introduction, with Law 94 of 2009, which came into force on August 8, 2009, of the "crime of clandestinity". The introduction of this crime in the Italian legal system, therefore, is to be considered as the culmination of a process breaking down the guarantees of the rule of law in favour of the formation of a legal force damaging for a particular category of human beings: migrants, and in particular sans papiers. Besides, this new crime refers to a status (sans papiers) in a given space and not to the performance of an action.

It contributes to making the bearers of this condition a "surplus" over a structured system and, because of the greater vulnerability to which the subjects are forced, it contributes to making this surplus functional to the management of power dynamics in certain social and private spaces, as well as to the management of certain forms of criminal governance and the encouragement of certain forms of welfarism. Therefore, the delegitimation of the right to be on a territory foments some circuits through which migrants might be easily exploited by criminal agencies, might be subjected to new forms of slavery or re-qualified as a victim of the system. In any case, their poiesis passes through a condition linked to the possibility of enjoying a space and acting in it. The political codification of the body itself creates a grammar of the illicitness of presence in order to create effects that are political. The assumption of indictability by condition and not by action produces, in fact, the prosecutability of presence by denying an ethics of the possibility to have an aspiration that can extend the improvement of the quality of life standards in a space other than the designated one.

Managing the space and the power connected to it means managing the presence of human beings in a given territory. Space and power are to be read as an open system of structuring structures that function as structured and are recognizable in the tension between the claims of essentialization of those who are agents of power and the ability that those who are managed by power have to create escape lines. This essentialisation aims to create a category of human misfits, the waste and rubble through which the nation state has grown and thanks to which, renouncing the (now failed) functions of guarantor of welfare, seeks to recover credibility in the eyes of the citizen, making security policy the focus of its agenda.

It is, therefore, a real process of marginal re-territorialization that governments try to manage. The great limit of any device of control, inclusion and exclusion, in fact, is always the same: not to take into account that we are part, to say it with Deleuze, of a world of changeable flows (Deleuze, Guattari 2010) and that the capacity of resistance and poiesis of man is superior to the attempts of delimitation imposed by certain forms of social control. The fact remains that such practices and policies, by reifying forms of exclusion, are connected to structural asymmetries which end up by producing policies of marginality. The myth on which the nation-state is based feeds on the opposition between residents and immigrants who become symbolic and structural enemies (Dal Lago 2009). As Bauman (Bauman 2003) observes, it is the State that, going beyond the competences of international agreements, legislates by determining who, and under what conditions, can be admitted within its own borders. And it does so by claiming in the eyes of the citizens the will to safeguard itself and its own structure, not acknowledging, instead, that it is no longer in the position to legitimise itself.

Outclassed by extraterritorial spaces, unable to manage and respond to the social and economic insecurities of their citizens, stripped of most of their sovereign capabilities and prerogatives by the forces of globalization that they are unable to oppose - and even less to control - governments can only carefully choose the targets that they are presumably able to oppose and against which they can act through their rhetoric (Bauman 2003: 72). On a local scale, the attempt to recover social consensus develops on the rhetoric of the reissue (Appadurai 1996) of one's own "ethnic identity", through the processes of common identification that act on the collective imagination of the national community (Anderson 2005). And it is precisely from imagination as a social practice that one determines what (and who) is "inside" and what (and who) is "outside". Bauman (Bauman 1995), certainly paraphrasing Tolstoy, writes that "all societies produce foreigners but each produces a particular type of foreigners, according to unique and irrepeatable ways". The fact that identity and ethnic classifications are ideological constructs does not mean that they do not act as real or do not have any social consequences.

One of the levels at which we can read recession, social insecurity, fear, is that of attributing the evils that trouble us to the invasion of foreigners who are thus presented as an indistinct mass, nourishing an imaginary that exalts autochthony (or, better, its representation). But even those who engage in "integration" practices by talking about "multiculturalism" or "interculturalism" contribute to forging an imaginary that, leaving their homes, could risk meeting (or clashing with) "cultural masses" and not people. A bit as if all of us, instead of meeting men, women, children, each with their own stories, their own resources and their own miseries, we met "cultures". The risk is that we no longer talk about human beings, social and legal subjects, but about groups, which are already frightening because of the idea of quantity.

That the self, even in its collective form, is determined by opposition, is a well-known fact, just as it is known that foundation myths are based on the "us/them" opposition.

All societies need to recognize metaphysical enemies that justify collective misfortunes and public enemies. The State/nation equivalence, however, is broken in favour of diasporic communities and dislocated relationships that require global political arenas. The migratory experience produces effects that shape both the relationships that migrants develop in the place of arrival (with that society, but also with other migrants) and the management of the place itself, both in the field of institutional policies and social practices, to the point that the migratory phenomenon is defined as a "total social fact" (Sayad 1999). Yet the perpetuation of certain social structures, with the consequent inconsistency between the practices that tend to stress these structures and tightening policies, is such that, since the 1990s, countries such as Italy, which act as an outpost for access to Europe, have continued to enact highly restrictive and repressive legislative measures against immigrants. This is because some human destinies are subject both to power games on a planetary scale and to political games on a local scale.

The political space and the nation-state are built and grow through the "opposition to/exclusion of" combination according to the anachronistic but tenaciously defended coincidence that "must" exist between the principle of citizenship based on an exclusive cohesion and the borders of the nation-state, so that the exclusion from the state territory of that part of human beings in excess is self-legitimized, making the methodology of exclusion and the classification of the excluded the cornerstone of the political agenda. It is, therefore, a real process of marginal re-territorialization that governments try to manage without taking into account that they too are part of a world of changeable flows (Deleuze, Guattari 2010). Judith Butler (Butler, Spivak 2007) wonders if we can think of Europe as an entity that establishes itself as governance by determining borders and an immigration policy upon the offer that it made to various countries on the control of borders guaranteeing low paid workers, who will enter with a status less than legal and with temporary contracts that do not alter the population.

Butler argues that naked life should be conceived as an unprotected exposure to state violence and, although she criticizes Agamben (Agamben 1995) and his idea of homo sacer, the fact that he considers it prior to political dimension, comes much closer than she herself wants to admit to the Agambian idea when she argues that naked life has the paradoxical form of "included exclusion", because it becomes part of the political precisely with its exclusion because it is embodied in the homo sacer and it connects to the state of exception (Butler, Spivak 2009). Homo sacer, in the Latin tradition, was the man who, having performed an action that jeopardized the relationship between man and divinity, did not deserve the attention of a trial but, isolated, had to be exposed to the direct punishment of the gods. If someone had killed him, moreover, he could not have been charged with murder. For Agamben (Agamben 1995: 9), all men are potentially sacred and the production of a biopolitical body is the original function of sovereign power in the state of exception. Agamben (Agamben 2003: 55) traces the archetype of the state of exception back to the senatus consultum ultimum, a paradoxical legal act by which, by proclaiming the state of emergency, the Roman senate put full powers into the hands of one person and essentially overruled the state of right.

This is a liminal situation, in which outlaw acts are produced but which have the force of law (ibid.: 44). In such a situation the naked life can be killed without the crime of murder being committed. Bauman (Bauman 2003: 42), continuing the reading of Agamben (Agamben 1995), says that homo sacer is a category of human misfits, the waste and rubble through which the nation-state has grown up and thanks to which, renouncing the (now failed) functions of guarantor of welfare, it tries to recover credibility in the eyes of the citizen, making security policy the heart of its agenda. Hannah Arendt (Arendt 1996: 372) wrote: "they find themselves to be, without any right, the foam of the earth". Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (in Borradori 2003), although starting from different premises, came to the conclusion that some categories of thought produced by the Enlightenment have to be reinterpreted with respect to modernity (sovereignty of States, international law), because they have reached the limit of their conceptual effectiveness. In particular, Derrida argued, the concept of "tolerance" should be replaced by that of "unconditional hospitality"; the philosopher saw in Europe, squeezed between Bush's Christian fundamentalism and Bin Laden's Islamic fundamentalism, the only possibility for the affirmation of a cosmopolitanism for which the human being could enjoy a legal system that ignored geographical affiliation.

On the other hand, European citizenship, established at the end of a long process that began with the Treaty of Rome in 1957 (which established the European Economic Community) and sanctioned in Maastricht with the Treaty of 7 February 1992 (which came into force on 1 November of the following year), is a "derived" citizenship in that it is a complement to that of the state. The possibility of accessing it for a non-European migrant, therefore, is conditioned by the status granted to him/her in the country where he/ she resides. The paradox, however, is that the institution of European citizenship acquires meaning if one lives outside one's own state, as it guarantees the migrants' own rights, provided that they are European migrants. Although many EU declarations guarantee the rights of the human being, in practice there is a gap between declarations of intent and real access to resources by non-European migrants, because the acquisition of citizenship is a substantial and not a formal problem. Balibar (Balibar 2000, Balibar 2008) emphasizes that national rights have become privileges and speaks of the historical need to extend certain rights and establish new ones in order to confront the "apartheid" regime which, from militarized borders, is coming to the heart of the metropolis.

Yet, on a theoretical level, the institution of European citizenship could have had a strong destructuring power fundamental to a new solidarity set-up. The exclusion of the most vulnerable immigrants from the possibility of participating in political life is the real challenge to the liberal-democratic values and to institutional procedures so highly appreciated in pluralist democracies. The practices and policies that are implemented in the name of justice reify forms of injustice, since justice itself is linked to structural asymmetries at the planetary level, with the consequence of producing policies of marginality. The importance of grasping the historicity of law and the contingency of laws also helps to understand the criteria by which one becomes a citizen.

In a State like Italy, characterized by a historical phenomenon of emigration, the choice to perpetuate the right of citizenship with the ius sanguinis was functional to a given historical moment. The rhetoric that aims to make this right as a trans-historical and intrinsically valid choice operate a sort of removal of the events typical of the "entrepreneurs of memory" that transform the past into an arena of political and social conflicts of the present (Habermas 2006). The acquisition of Italian citizenship, regulated by the law 91 of 1992 (rules on citizenship), also occurs by ius soli if the person born on Italian territory is the child of unknown or stateless parents and in some other specific cases. Since there is no precise directive from the Ministry of the Interior and, therefore, decisions on these issues are entrusted to the discretion of the competent offices on the territory, the social vulnerability of weak people is amplified. In Italy, one can identify specific stages of a historical process that has led to the reconfiguration of the human being into a regular, irregular, illegal migrant.

The illegality of the migrant is a legal product (De Genova 2004) that classifies the various categories of "foreigners". The term "non-EU", for example, is a legal and historically determined neologism: Romanians living in any state of the European Union before 2007 (when Romania and Bulgaria became member states) were non-EU citizens and their presence was regulated by this condition, as well as their daily life, their working and affective relationships and social life. After 2007, their presence changed legal status, but not only that. The new recognition, in time, also becomes lower social vulnerability. It is obvious that this is true up to a certain degree. The fact of being the bearer of certain rights in theory does not mean that it can be so in practice. Access to certain resources, in fact, is conditioned by a multiplicity of factors for which there is no mathematical equivalence between the legal recognition of European citizens and social recognition, but certainly the entry into the European Union has triggered a process through which circuits are envisaged that someone will be able to exploit.

The fracture between formal and substantive accessibility to some rights, on the other hand, thanks also to a Kafkaesque hyperburocratization, is an impasse with which many social groups deal daily. Since 1986, that is since the proclamation of the law number 943 (the Foschi law) of 30 December 1986 (Regulations on the placement and treatment of non-EU immigrant workers and against illegal immigration), the political and legal management of the presence of foreigners on the territory has been based on the principle of "emergency". The latter is often solved with "amnesties", so that the State, after having delegitimized their presence (fomenting practices of social blackmail), allows the reintroduction into the legal circuits through a huge economic outlay (the emergence plan) and quite anachronistic conditions that in a historical moment when work is based on the flexibility of contracts, such as having (except for domestic work) a permanent job.

One can guess how, at an institutional level, the life paths of migrants and their public perception can be pre-structured. Youssou is a Senegalese boy who is a street vendor. He came to Palermo from Brescia, although with a considerable reduction in his income, following the advice of his uncle because, in the absence of papers, the risk of incurring a decree of expulsion in the Sicilian capital is lower (conversation of March 10, 2011):

I must have a car, you see? How could you do it otherwise, with sweaters, jeans... those you put on top [...] yes, jackets. Where do you put all the things for the market? You need car, you do [...] No, I don't have a fake driving licence. I considered making one, but I buy everything from Italians here, I don t go to Naples. [...] I think I ask another to make a licence for me, but now I use my senegalese driving licence [...]. No insurance. I always wear that [safety] belt because I am a foreigner, so no one says anything. [...] Yes, I was stopped here in Ballard, twice. [...] You show my senegalese licence and the police says it is no good, [but they don't] do anything, they let me go. [...] I have no car insurance, the police knows that I need to work and they don't say anything me. [...] I better if I have papers. [...] In Bergamo I could not do this, better here, but [much] better ifI has papers?

The migrant is defined on the basis of the possession or not of the documents that make his presence on the territory lawful: "regular" (with residence permit), "irregular" (with expired residence permit), "illegal" (without residence permit). Whether or not a requirement is met becomes the dividing line between legality and illegality. Stereotypical media representations generally attribute to the "irregular" or "clandestine" migrant the characteristics that would be attributed to an outlaw, while being an "outsider". In particular, the term "clandestine" refers to a universe of illegal actions linked to the exercise of practices. Irregularity and clandestinity, on the other hand, become illegal under the conditions of existence. The production of illegality, therefore, is no longer linked to an action, but to a state, a space, a condition, an age.

One is illegal by the very fact of being. The sanctioning of the illegality of the presence of the body in its existence makes it possible to witness a dichotomous dismemberment between the person and his/her body, to which no agents are recognized. The presence of the body conveys a state of illegality regardless of the performance of an action. But if the law acts as a device for controlling lives, and in the case of migrants' lives this control often has the taste of coercion, it is also true that human beings' poietic capacity is such as to find unprecedented solutions or, at least, compromises capable of reshaping instances and needs. The question thus is: will the resonance of these centres succeed in shaking and delegitimising pre-constituted orders before they are brought back to the norm? Using the metaphor of Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze, Guattari 2010: 458-462), one could suppose so: deterritorialized human beings are numbering numbers compared to territorialized human beings (who are numbered numbers) and have the characteristic of being in an always complex and articulated movement capable of producing "effects of immensity through a subtle articulation" (ibid: 462).

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