Center for Identification and Expulsion (CIE) in Rome. Stefano Montesi/Demotix. All Rights Reserved.
Italy’s legal and policy approach to immigration is widely seen as a relatively recent improvisation by a state adjusting to the country’s new status as a migrant-receiving area. And yet Italy’s history of labour mobility stretches back to pre-unitary years, and includes both spectacular outward movements across Europe and continents as well as micro and macro internal movements of populations from the impoverished countryside and the country’s southern area. This article intends to reconnect the country’s present approach to mobility to its past history of internal migration. In doing this, it will highlight specific elements of continuity in particular with fascist rules and practices over internal labour mobility.
The Italian state has endeavoured to control its highly mobile population ever since its creation in 1861. In doing so, it produced a range of marginal subjects that were later condensed into the figure of the ‘southern emigrant’. One such mechanism of control linked residence to work contracts. During the 1920s and 1930s, the fascist regime set up a complex system of labour institutions and population registry offices. These served to establish a dividing line between local and ‘foreign’ workers, namely those who formally enjoyed Italian citizenship but who had moved from impoverished rural areas to the cities. Only workers officially resident and enrolled in the fascist union were allowed to be regularly employed under this system. The rest were encouraged to establish rural communities within the national territory and work the fields and marshlands there. Behind the fascist rhetoric about ruralising Italy, such measures sought to address what was perceived as a more pressing problem: the need to protect the urban middle-class from poor immigrants, who were considered as parasites living in idleness and spreading corruption.
