Temporal Apartheid As Italian Response to Global Migration

The migratory phenomenon reveals the contradictions of globalization and belies the rhetoric of open borders. Despite the economically strongest countries spend huge sums to limit immigration, more and more migrants reach the destination countries.

In many Western societies (like Italy) the local response to this global phenomenon is discriminatory, and places migrants in a peculiar spatio-temporal collocation that I call “temporal apartheid”.

Wearing the lens of the politics of time (migration policy is one of them), and mixing theoretical sources and empirical data, my intervention aims to illustrate how migrants in Italy are experiencing a condition of non-coevalness than natives, since the two social groups share the same space but not the same social time. Analysing some demographic, social and economic dimensions, in fact, it emerges how migrants live in a kind of temporal apartheid (as I called it) according to parameters characterizing a very different period than that contemporary one. So, they result to be confined in a separate social world.

Allochronic temporal policies produce significant social consequences. To analysing them, Merton's means-goals pattern and Hirschman's tunnel effect are employed. In brief, the gap between socially desirable goals and available means has very real effects on migrants: poverty, marginalization, but also frustration (especially on II generation migrants) because while goals are formulated in the present (and eventually achievable in the future), means are placed in the past ("where" migrants are living) and generally are inadequate or insufficient to achieve the purposes.

The prolonged discrepancy between means and goals (aspirations, using Appadurai's terminology) could produce potentially deviant and protest attitudes (called by Merton "rebellion", by Hirschman “exit”)". Using this “tools” the French banlieues riots and the foreign fighters phenomenon are analysed.