Elizabeth Arquinigo Pardo is a 28-year-old Peruvian woman who has been living in Italy since the age of ten. She is not an Italian citizen yet owing to the citizenship law, which prescribes a complex set of conditions and procedures to become one, unless you were the issue of Italian loins. But Elizabeth has fulfilled all the conditions for acquiring Italian citizenship, and has applied for it. She is supposed to wait for up to two years before having her citizenship request accepted or rejected. In the meantime, she has started working at the Milan Police Headquarters as an interpreter on a fixed-term contract for a European agency (European Asylum Support Office), and she does her job to everybody’s full satisfaction, as stated by the cooperative which formally hired her.
Then one day her path crossed with that of the far-right League Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini. In September 2018 the latter produced his “security decree”, which, among other things, makes the acquisition of citizenship more difficult. In particular, it lengthens the term within which the applications for citizenship can be accepted or rejected from two to four years. Four years’ time in which the applicants live in limbo: still foreigners for the bureaucracy, they cannot take up study or job offers abroad, for example, because the continuous residence requirement would no longer be met, or they cannot afford to lose their jobs, because not only would they not be able to fulfill the income conditions prescribed by law, but they would also be liable to be expelled from the country (expelled to go where, if you were born in Italy or have been living there since you were a child?). Not to mention further direct or indirect discriminations signifying your unequal status in the country you grew up in, starting with the right to vote.
But Elizabeth is not going to take all this lying down. She put pen to paper and wrote an open letter to Salvini, and, not being satisfied with his reply, she expanded it into a book. And she went out to promote it, take part in meetings, and telling her story.
