Abstract
This important and insightful book documents migrants’ everyday encounters with Italy’s “documentation regime,” a bewildering government bureaucracy lacking transparency, accountability, and consistency that migrants must navigate to secure and maintain legal status, bring family members into the country, and attain Italian citizenship. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2009 and 2016 in a city in the northern Emilia-Romagna region, Rules, Paper, Status: Migrants and Precarious Bureaucracy in Contemporary Italy follows migrants, their non-governmental advisors, and public officials who implement and bend the rules interpreting Italy’s exclusionary yet flexible immigration laws that regulate the lives of migrants residing in Italy. Anna Tuckett vividly describes how Italy’s frequently changing immigration laws and their inconsistent implementation produce anxiety, insecurity, and tensions for migrants, who experience continued social marginalization even if they are long-term, culturally integrated residents. Yet she also highlights how migrants with knowledge of Italian immigration laws can become brokers and advisors to other migrants, in the process building social and economic capital while ensuring that Italy’s migration bureaucracy does not succumb to its own irrationality.
The book is clearly structured and has eight chapters. The Introduction discusses the increased bureaucratization of migration flows and provides an overview of migrants in Italy and Italian immigration laws, which are simultaneously harsh and lenient. Chapter One introduces the book’s central fieldwork site: a migrant advice center affiliated with a labor union that helps migrants with filling out forms and offers advice on navigating Italy’s precarious immigration bureaucracy. Chapters Two and Three explore how first-generation migrants manipulate and successfully navigate this bureaucracy using both informal and extralegal rule-bending, practices that can put migrants in danger of losing legal status or prevent them from obtaining Italian citizenship.
Chapter Four focuses on community brokers, migrants who use their knowledge of Italian immigration laws and cultural dexterity to help others while improving their own community standing and socioeconomic mobility. While Chapter Five considers how encounters with Italy’s immigration bureaucracy create upset and disjuncture for 1.5- and second-generation migrants, Chapter Six discusses how uncertain legal status, discrimination, and lack of social mobility cause many migrants to feel disappointment and personal failure and to view Italy as a stepping stone to a better destination elsewhere in Europe. The Conclusion contextualizes the book’s findings within broader processes of contemporary migration and globalization and points out the political utilities—to different public and private actors—of the Italian immigration system’s contradictions.
One of the book’s strengths lies in its contributions to the literature on the immigration bureaucracy. In contrast to much of the existing scholarship on how migrants engage with nation-state borders and their regulatory structures, this book zooms in on how migrants engage with the “documentation regime” that regulates their lives while living within Italy’s nation-state boundaries. The book illustrates well how “legal” and “illegal” are not statuses created by migrants’ practices of crossing borders with or without papers; rather, they result from confusing and rapidly changing legal and bureaucratic processes within borders devised by governments. Also, while the growing scholarship on immigrant bureaucratic incorporation addresses how street-level bureaucrats and local government agencies have acted to accommodate (or resist) migrants, who often lack political power and are excluded from the electoral process and governing coalitions, this book instead focuses on migrants’ own agency and tactics in the production and implementation of immigration laws. Notably, the book highlights how migrants in contemporary Italy cope with ever-changing immigration laws and government officials’ discretionary implementation of them by simultaneously navigating through loopholes, engaging in informal and extralegal rule-bending, and developing authentic (even if false) paper trails.
Another strength of the book is its discussion of “cultural citizenship,” a concept introduced by Aihwa Ong (1996) that Tuckett adopts and extends to highlight the dynamic interplay between forms of cultural beliefs and practices on the one hand and legal citizenship on the other. Tuckett shows that by learning to engage in rule-bending and manipulation to navigate Italy’s inefficient, incompetent, and sometimes corrupt bureaucracy, first-generation migrants become “cultural citizens” by adopting broader Italian attitudes toward the state and government bureaucracy. But while encounters with Italy’s immigration bureaucracy constitute forms of citizen-making, migrants who engage in such forms of insider behavior for long periods of time run the risk of making missteps that result in their applications for citizenship and other forms of secure legal status being denied. At the same time, culturally integrated 1.5- and second-generation migrants are often forced into irregularity because of exclusionary immigration and citizenship laws that they are not always aware of. In addition, migrants who acquired citizenship are often depicted as inauthentic because Italian understandings of citizenship are highly racialized, thus precluding the recognition of Italian citizens of color. In all, this book provides a critical ethnographic discussion of what Didier Fassin (2001) has referred to as the “biopolitics of otherness.”
While Rules, Paper, Status does a wonderful job in demonstrating and foregrounding migrants’ agency as they interact with Italian immigration bureaucracy, I would have welcomed more discussion of the experiences of those who are part of the immigration bureaucracy, such as those working at the local immigration office where migrants’ applications for permit renewals are processed and decided. How do these street-level bureaucrats, as well as staff and volunteers of the migrant advice center, see and understand their work and their interactions with migrants? As a scholar of social movements and civic organizations, I would have also welcomed a discussion of the collective behaviors or campaigns that migrants and their supporters might have engaged in to shape their interactions with local immigration officials or to change the way the local immigration office went about its work. Did such collective organizing or strategizing happen? If so, to what end? If not, why not?
Overall, Rules, Paper, Status is a welcome and timely addition to scholarship on migration and the anthropology of state-society relations. It provides valuable insights into how contemporary migrants navigate Italy’s labyrinth of immigration laws and precarious bureaucratic practices that conceive migrants as temporary and marginal. The book’s accessible and engaging narrative along with its compelling ethnographic data make it recommended reading for students, academics, and practitioners, especially those interested in migration, law and society, anthropology, ethnography, and race and ethnicity.