Island of Hope

Migration and Solidarity in the Mediterranean

Megan A. Carney

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520975569
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia culturale e sociale

With thousands of migrants attempting the perilous maritime journey from North Africa to Europe each year, transnational migration is a defining feature of social life in the Mediterranean today. On the island of Sicily, where many migrants first arrive and ultimately remain, the contours of migrant reception and integration are frequently animated by broader concerns for human rights and social justice. Island of Hope sheds light on the emergence of social solidarity initiatives and networks forged between citizens and noncitizens who work together to improve local livelihoods and mobilize for radical political change. Basing her argument on years of ethnographic fieldwork with frontline communities in Sicily, anthropologist Megan Carney asserts that such mobilizations hold significance not only for the rights of migrants, but for the material and affective well-being of society at large.

1

Austerity and Migration as Mediterranean “Questions”

The economic crisis in Europe has pushed society, and above all, politicians, to demonize migrants.

—Reception center director, June 2018

The once triumphant ethos of a united Europe with open internal borders, and a commitment to liberal, social democratic politics that has shaped Europe since the Second World War is everywhere in retreat. There is a growing Euro-scepticism sweeping the continent. . . . [T]he European project is under pressure because of the perception (propagated through the media and by varied populist politicians) of an overwhelming “wave” of migrants coming into the continent from North Africa and the Middle East that is flowing across Europe’s open internal borders.

—Teresa Fiore and Ernest Ialongo, “Introduction: Italy and the Euro-Mediterranean ‘Migrant Crisis’ ”

“ITALIANS FIRST!”

According to a national survey conducted in 2017, levels of hostility toward migrants in Italy were at a record high and mounting. One in two Italians perceived migrants as a threat to society that should be expelled (Camilli 2018). The victors of Italy’s 2018 national election ascended to office championing “Prima gli italiani!” (Italians first!) and “Aiutiamoli a casa loro!” (Let’s send them home!) as campaign slogans. “Italians first!” resonated with Italian voters both for eschewing migrants, who were perceived as competing with Italian citizens for limited public resources, and for deeming austerity an unfair sacrifice being made by Italians to benefit other nations within the EU. In his 2018 inaugural speech, Italy’s newly appointed prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, restated his promise to enforce a “tough line” on migrants and to reject economic austerity (Agence France-Presse 2018).¹

Stoking economic and nativist anxieties, Italy’s far-right politicians have been actively campaigning against migration for years and with demonstrable results. Social media platforms especially have enabled far-right populists to disseminate “disinformazione” (disinformation)—as noted by my interlocutors—that reframes Italy’s economic woes as the result of “a migrant invasion.” According to many of those I interviewed over the span of five years in which a period of stringent austerity measures and record migrant arrivals in the Mediterranean overlapped, these politicians were responsible for cultivating “un clima d’odio” (a climate of hate) among the Italian public and reinforcing race-based (white) claims to Italian citizenship. References to Italy’s declining fertility rate, for instance, had amplified decades-long concerns about the very idea of Italianness (and Europeanness more generally) as being under siege by foreign, nonwhite Others (De Genova 2016, 2018; Hawthorne 2017; Krause 2005; Krause and Marchesi 2007; New Keywords Collective 2016).² Far-right, populist parties had even resorted to exploiting the voices of migrants themselves in campaign propaganda to underscore the hardships that migrants would encounter in coming to Europe. A controversial video released in 2014 and commissioned by Angelo Ciocca, a candidate for the EU Parliament campaigning with the far-right political party Lega Nord, epitomized such efforts. The video, recorded in several languages with Italian subtitles, featured five immigrants from Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Angola, and North Africa warning their compatriots, “Don’t come to Italy,” because of the difficult economic conditions. As described by one of the video’s protagonists, “Italy, along with Spain and Greece, is one of the poorest countries in Europe. So don’t delude yourselves: now Italy can’t offer anything to anyone. Don’t come here because you will be sentenced to hunger.”³

Today’s global migration trends and economic systems are indeed intertwined, but the reality is significantly more complex than typically acknowledged by far-right politicians and mainstream media. This chapter is focused, in part, on probing this relationship and showing how experiences of austerity in the European context—and particularly in Sicily—have articulated with political and economic transformations in both Italy’s welfare state and globally over the past few decades. As a starting point, I concur with the claim that “the question of Europe itself has become inextricable from the question of migration” (De Genova 2017, 22) and offer a revision: both “questions”—of Europe and of migration—have become inextricable from austerity politics. Although this chapter foregrounds the experiences of austerity primarily as they registered in Sicily, I align with recent anthropological scholarship that views these experiences as connecting more broadly to what is often imagined or described as the “Mediterranean” or “Southern Europe.” As described by Knight and Stewart (2016, 2), “The imposition of austerity measures . . . has had the effect of converting this Southern part of the European Union into an area unified by shared problems, emergencies, and exigencies. The study of the Mediterranean . . . analyses how societies in this region negotiate the structural violence (economic and political) to which they are all now subject.” Following my discussion of austerity’s permutations in Sicily as well as at the national level in Italy, I pivot to examining the question of migration in the Mediterranean, particularly Sicilian and Italian, contexts. I bring these questions—of austerity and of migration—together to show how Sicilians, and to some extent Italians as well as migrants, have been conditioned toward specific ways of being—and feeling—in the world that facilitate both the further entrenchment of neoliberal projects and the possibilities for alternatives.

“GREEK-STYLE TAKEOVER” OF SICILY

Headline: “Monti plans ‘Greek-style’ takeover of Sicily to avert default—Italian premier Mario Monti is mulling emergency action to take direct control of Sicily’s regional government before the island spirals into a full-blown financial crisis, fearing contagion to the rest of Italy.”

—Daily Telegraph, July 18, 2012

Headline: “Italy Worries Sicily’s Woes Could Have Ripple Effect”

—National Public Radio, July 31, 2012

In July 2012, prominent Italian, European, and US-based media outlets unilaterally speculated about Sicily’s culpability in an impending financial crisis of national proportions. They cited Sicily’s €7 billion deficit that put the region in danger of default if the national government were to fail to impose sweeping cuts. Interviewed by a correspondent with US-based National Public Radio (NPR), one of Sicily’s public officials who had been appointed to trim the fat from the region’s budget warned of a monetary nightmare on the island: “I’m afraid we will soon no longer be able to pay civil servants’ salaries.”⁴

Alluding to a “Greek-style takeover,” these media reports made much reference to antiquated practices of clientelism and to ostensibly lavish spending in Sicily’s public sector. They described the regional government’s headquarters in Palermo’s Palazzo dei Normanni as being “grossly overmanned, with a bigger staff than Downing Street,”⁵ mainly explained by practices of hiring and promotion predicated not on merit but rather on political favors. Sicily was also being scrutinized by the EU, which was demanding that €600 million be returned due to alleged misuse of funds for frivolous projects such as couscous festivals and other cultural events on the island. For these reasons, Rome was “dictating tough bailout conditions on Sicily” similar to those “imposed on Greece”;⁶ it explicitly sought to penalize the island’s political elites whose decision making had been corrupted by relations of patronage and clientelism (Chubb 1982; Cole 1997; Orlando 2015). Similar arguments had been made to justify sweeping cuts in the recent past, as with the national economic crisis in the early 1990s, when Italy terminated the “Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, or Development Fund for the South, caricatured as having squandered valuable resources” (Schneider and Schneider 2003, 232).⁷ Moving to resist yet another attempt by Italy’s north to legitimize its political control of the south (see also Giordano 2014), Palermo’s public sector workers led citywide protests demanding that Italy “keep [its] hands off Sicily.” “We want to be our own master,” they proclaimed.⁸

At the same time, these media reports also acknowledged the role of drastic austerity measures in rendering Sicily’s debt. As one of Italy’s poorest regions, Sicily’s economy has long centered on public sector jobs and subsidies from the north. Summarized by one Sicilian journalist, and reiterated in various ways by my interlocutors, Sicilian municipalities (comuni) “live essentially by state and regional funds.” According to this journalist’s research, Sicilian municipalities received 61 percent of their funding from federal and regional sources, compared to the national average of 39 percent; local taxes accounted for only 28 percent of available funds, compared to the national average of 40 percent. He also noted vast discrepancies in the Italian state’s spending on Sicily versus other regions; while elected officials in Rome allocated €170 per capita to Sicily, the rest of Italy received an average of €380 per capita. Anticipating imminent cuts to public spending and slashes to Sicily’s budget, an editorial in Sicily’s regional newspaper noted that “those who pay will be the poor, the sick, and the marginalized” and mocked decision makers in Rome and Brussels: “There will not be development at this rate of Italian spending that is ‘excessive,’ ‘redundant,’ and ‘wasteful.’ ”⁹

“WE SICILIANI WERE ALREADY POOR”

“Sicily resisted [ha resistito] the effects of the [2008] economic crisis. Northern Italians suffered much worse,” a Palermo-based social worker told me. “We siciliani were already poor.” Aside from recalling that some family-owned businesses such as barber shops, beauty parlors, and clothing stores were forced to close due to increased belt tightening among consumers, my Sicilian interlocutors do not associate the 2008 crisis with wide-spread economic devastation. Instead, they allude to seasoned practices of intergenerational wealth transfer, resource pooling among kin and within communities, diversified income strategies of individuals and households, and transnational familial networks. In the case of this particular social worker, she had been sharing part of her income with her retired, pensioner parents and with her adult daughter. She also had a sister permanently living in the United States from whom she could ask for financial support, and her own family was deeply embedded in the local community owing to their palermitano heritage that traced back several generations.

While siciliani by and large related to me that they were generally unscathed by the 2008 global financial crisis, they have not managed to evade economic austerity. During the past decade, municipalities throughout Sicily have absorbed substantial cuts to budgets for public school systems (including school staff, meals, and bus service), clinics, information and communication technology systems, public health, city sanitation, street lighting and other infrastructure, and postal services. During the earlier years of my fieldwork, it was very common to overhear patrons at the local bar or gelateria grumbling about these cuts and speculating on their corollaries. Most siciliani I have come to know feel that Sicily has been (erroneously) blamed for problems that are endemic to the very existence of an Italian nation-state. They are also acutely aware of their unfavorable reputation among those in the north. Arguing that Sicily had unduly endured the worst of the worst, a 2011 editorial in Giornale di Sicilia underscored that state-mandated budget cuts were further evidence that northern Italians viewed Sicily as “the nation’s black sheep.”

Some weeks prior to my first visit to Sicily in 2014, I had been in contact with faculty members in the social sciences at the University of Palermo who I hoped to meet with and from whom I sought advice regarding lodging and transportation. In one email, a faculty member forewarned me about relying on public transportation from the Falcone-Borsellino airport to the center of Palermo, a distance of about 30 kilometers. While there was a passenger train that serviced this relatively short route, the number of daily departures had been significantly reduced and the trains rarely operated on schedule. As I learned through a multitude of conversations and my own direct experience over the course of my stay, such characterizations extended to all forms of public transportation. Tired of worrying about making it on time to meetings with individuals and organizations generous enough to indulge my research questions, I did as palermitani who were without access to a car, or motorino, elected to do: walk. Some days I walked for hours at a time, meandering my way through labyrinthine networks of streets that led me from the university to hospitals, clinics, and charitable assistance programs scattered throughout the city.

As any experienced ethnographer knows, these walks were immensely instructive in revealing the material and human dimensions of a debtridden society. Not a single piazza or busy street corner I passed in Palermo was without its share of residents holding signs that revealed some details of their calamitous fate(s) and pleading for help. With the exception of a few secluded, wealthier neighborhoods, most streets were littered with garbage, partly because dumpsters and receptacles had not been serviced in weeks, if not months, and were overflowing. Many buildings were in obvious disrepair, especially in the historic center where there was extensive scaffolding but rarely any work crews (figure 2). Cuts to public spending had stalled many of the city’s renovation efforts. I later learned that much of the structural damage in this part of the city had been caused by airstrikes during World War II. In short, local residents had initially been quite excited about plans for renovation finally coming to fruition. Sometimes this damage extended to buildings covering an entire city block. Nonetheless, these properties were not entirely vacant. The city’s poorest residents, along with the city’s thriving population of stray cats and dogs, often squatted there. Rather than simply vestiges of an economic crisis or traces of austerity’s gruesome toll, these aspects of Palermo’s cityscape revealed a deeper history of poverty, one distinctly embedded in claims by siciliani that “we were already poor.”

Figure 2. Condemned buildings surround a Palermo piazza. Photo by author.

When I would finally arrive at my destination at one of Palermo’s hospitals and clinics, I was particularly struck by the absence of any intake personnel. Aside from being stopped by a security guard who manned the front entrance of one of Palermo’s largest medical facilities, I usually proceeded straight ...