Agricultural Racial Capitalism and the Refugeezation of Migration: Exploring the State-Sanctioned Entrapment of Racialized Migrant Farmworkers in the Province of Foggia.
At the same time, in the past decade, migration underwent a process of “refugeezation” (Dines, Rigo 2015), whereby asylum became the only channel to obtain a regular status and waiting became a core element in defining experiences of migration in general. This transformation also affected the experience of racialized migrant farmworkers employed within Southern Italian agricultural sector who, from being mostly seasonal undocumented workers, increasingly became asylum seekers. Furthermore, following the increasing criminalization of labor exploitation and caporalato put in place by Italian government through the implementation of law 199/2016, a vicious circle was generated, according to which in order to be employed it is necessary not only to hold a valid permit of stay, but also other documents -such as ID card, tax revenue code, bank card- which, however, are often difficult to obtain due to the precarious legal status of asylum seekers and the widespread racism characterizing public offices’ employees. As a consequence of that, the grey area between documented and undocumented migrants grew disproportionally, with a large number of people being formally documented but unable to exercise any rights.
Building on five years of ethnographic observation and grassroots activism in two of the largest informal settlements of Foggia province (Borgo Mezzanone and Torretta Antonacci) as well as in public offices of the area (such as Immigration Office, Post Office, Civil Registration Office,etc.), the present contribution intends analyzing the ways in which administrative limbos have become a tool to implement a racialized management of labor force and migrant mobility, forcing an increasing number of racialized migrant farmworkers to be entrapped within informal settlements, due to their structurally precarious legal status.