Family reunification policies in Italy Ambivalences, discrimination, resistance

The Chapter analyses the migrant family reunification phenomenon and deepens how the migrant family is constructed in the political and administrative discourse, both at EU and Italian level, in order to understand the effect of the family reunification policies on family structures and their material conditions and social life. Italian migration and reunification policies – which implement European directives but, at the same time, constituted a model for the European legislation – select the family members of migrants admitted to reunification, on the basis of their productive capacity for the economy of the country of destination, identified in the spouse, the minor children and, only in exceptional cases, the parents. In doing so, the reunification policies act a process of institutional and legislative “nuclearization” and “vulnerabilization” of the migrant family. This has negative repercussions on the reunited family in emotional and relational terms, as well as in terms of conciliation between working times and family times. Moreover, by imposing material requirements – especially relating to job, wage and housing dimension –, reunification policies are configured as policies for the regulation and discipline of migrant work and, consequently, work as a whole. Here, then, these policies configure boundaries and constraints within which the migrant families are situated, outlining a civic stratification scenario and a socio-working disciplinary device, highlighting the destination society’s ambivalences, as well as tensions and contradictions between (labour) market, State and the society itself. That is, the dimension of state policies clashes, on the one hand, with that of the needs of the market and, on the other hand, with that of the symbolic meanings, expectations and moral values of society. Within this dialectic, made up of ambivalences and contradictions, the trajectories and the forms of resistance of migrant workers and reunited families take shape. Therefore, the process of family reunification is configured as a multifaceted prism, in which lights and shadows coexist, but also as a field of struggle in which different social actors collide, with their own interests and agency: State, (labour) market, society and migrant families.