The Quasi-Citizenship of Young Descendants of Migrants in Italy: A Central Issue

This paper focuses on the experience of young people with a migration background in Italy. It has progressively consolidated, at least from a quantitative point of view. The increase in their presence in schools, their voice experiences through associations, and the growing space in the public debate have not yet translated into a systemic recognition. Still too often, young Italians with a migrant background are de facto Italians, without being so either in law - in the absence of a complete citizenship reform - or in terms of public rhetoric.

This situation entails for the descendants of migrants a field of possibilities characterised by multiple vectors of tension. From this point of view, their experience observes a habitus of “quasi-citizenship”. On the one hand, young descendants of migrants act it out and put it in tension by identifying and tenaciously experimenting with spaces of substantial citizenship (school, associationism, informal practices). On the other hand, this habitus is repeatedly objectified by an almost limbic situation in which the horizon of citizenship by birth is repeatedly evoked as a goal now “imposed” by an accomplished quantitative presence but subsequently sacrificed insofar as it is defined as not a priority in the face of other “urgencies” of the country. This continuous postponement no longer takes on the appearance of a haphazard succession of disconnected practices of disavowal, but rather a sort of confirmation of those material and symbolic field constraints that continue to hinder the participation of young descendants of migrants in Italy. This “quasi-citizenship” then becomes a space of conflict between enabling and normalising practices, between voices from below and attempts at reconfiguration from above; but it also becomes a strategic space on which the chances of future participation in Italian society of young descendants of migrants depend in many ways.