Encounters with the Clandestino/a and the nomad in Milan : Securitisation, irregularisation and the illegitimate outsider through the Italian 'security package'

Abstract

On the 21st May 2008, Berlusconi’s newly elected coalition il Popolo della Libertà announced its Security Package: a bundle of temporary and permanent legislative measures that identified a continuum of insecurities which included organized crime, urban degradation, illicit drug use, and ‘illegal’ or ‘clandestine’ migration. At the same time, it also announced a second set of laws, commonly referred to as the ‘Nomad Emergency Decree’, which declared a ‘State of Emergency with regards to the Settlement of Nomad Communities in the regions of Lazio, Campania and Lombardy’. Two figures were continually invoked throughout the debates and the progressive enactment of the legislations: the ‘clandestino/a’ (clandestine immigrant) and the ‘nomad’. This research took these two figures as its starting point. It considered how they came to be imagined as ‘illegitimate outsiders’ in the nation, and subsequently constituted as ‘objects of security’ through ongoing processes of securitisation and irregularisation.

This research draws on a range of literature that understands citizenship to be mutually constituted with its (legitimate and illegitimate) outsiders. Following this, I argue that the processes which differentiate between citizens and non-citizens act to produce a complex topology of (whole and partial) insiders and outsiders. In this context, securitisation and irregularisation are considered as complementary strategies of citizenship, which operate together (and with other strategies) to continually reconstitute the boundaries of the political community. In this research, I consider securitisation and irregularisation as operating through official and popular discourses, legislation, as well as through the everyday practices of security professionals, including the police, military, and bureaucrats. Furthermore, I understand these processes – and the figures they produce – to be encountered, negotiated and reworked in the everyday by those individuals and groups who are cast as ‘objects of security’. This analysis acknowledges that these processes of securitisation and irregularisation did not originate in the Security Package but were refracted through it.

This research focused on three groups that are, to some extent, identified through the figure of the ‘clandestino/a’ or the ‘nomad’: Romanian Roma living in unauthorized encampments, Latin-American domestic workers who live and work in Italian homes, and irregular Senegalese traders selling counterfeit bags from the city’s streets. Through in-depth interviews and participant observation in three sites in Milan, the research considered how the figures of the clandestino/a and the nomad came to be variously emplaced and embodied, thereby producing multiple counterpoints to citizenship. These counterpoints suggest that the boundaries of citizenship are neither fixed nor complete. There is a complex topology at the edges of citizenship in which one can, for example, be an irregular and illegitimate outsider, regular but still considered illegitimate, or irregular but identified as a legitimate outsider in the nation.