In Italy, all persons legally present on the national territory have the duty to declare their presence in the registration offices of the municipality in which they live; at the same time, they have the right to be enrolled in those same offices and to obtain their residency. On paper, this is a simple and rapid administrative procedure and does not reveal many elements of a political character. At a superficial glance, residency thus appears to be a status of secondary importance. Oneâs having been enrolled in the registration office of a municipality is normally considered a banality and is almost taken for granted: all peopleâone tends to believeâare residents in the municipality where they live, at least so long as they do not decide of their own spontaneous determination to maintain enrolment in a place different from that in which they pass the better part of their existence.
A personâs relationship with the municipal institutions that manage the registration offices is consequently a matter of almost total indifference, or at most of discomfort, such as manifests when a person believes that he/she needs toâor else perceives himself/herself constrained toâmodify his/her registrational status, and thus faces probable queues at the offices of the local administration. Realisation that the full enjoyment of a vast range of rights depends on the recognition of residency is generally rare, if not altogether non-existent.
However, indifference or discomfort rapidly transforms into unease and worry when, in the face of oneâs request, oneâs application is rejected or revoked. In this case, the relation between the civil registry and rights emerges in all its dramatic evidence: the consequences of a lack of civil registration can manifest immediately, translating themselves into difficulty in accessing the National Health Service, the care of by the social services, the assignment of public housing, the granting of economic subsidies, etc.
To a more attentive gaze, therefore, residency appears to be a strategic and central legal institution in the daily life of a great many individuals. Its absence is equivalent to the negationâthrough legal or often simply bureaucratic channelsâof fundamental rights recognised by state and regional laws. Oneâs enrolment in the registry office, contrary to what is widely believed, is therefore not to be taken for granted.
There is another question relative to the function of residency which is neither banal nor obvious, despite any appearances to the contrary. Rarely does one inquire as to the ends of this institution, which is to say, the social and political objectives it permits one to attain. Usually, reflections on this question are considered only by âexpertsâ, or else by those who are unfortunate enough to personally experience the bureaucratic barriers to civil registration and, consequently, who are forced to realise that the condition of resident constitutes a necessary step on the path to accessing rights. In these cases, the principalâif not the onlyâaim that one tends to attribute to the municipal registries is precisely that of granting access to benefits and services which are legally guaranteed by Italian law, or else of voting in the political and administrative elections.
And yet, the civil registry did not emerge to guarantee the exercise of social and political rights. It was rather introduced in order to gather information on the population and on its characteristics, above all in terms of population mobilityâwhich is to say, in order to study the composition and movements of the population. The original function of the institution of the civil registry, in other words, was that of monitoring individuals and the way in which they are distributed over the territory.
Within the Italian system, residency is therefore a necessary instrument for the construction of a path of individual âautonomyâ, but, at the same time, it is a provision for control, and, as such, limits the possibilities of individual action. Residency therefore has an ambivalent character: its lack makes it impossible for a person to exercise his/her rights, while its possession represents a potential restriction of freedom. Moreover, the registry offices have a profoundly âpoliticalâ nature: while they appear to be a technical-administrative measure, indifferent to questions relative to the priorities and the founding principles of a society, in reality, they substantially condition societal structures, producing effects in terms of justice and equality.
More specifically, the intrinsically ambivalent constitution of the registry offices renders their âpoliticalâ use problematic. These registries are a central part of the organisational machine of the state, itself a political entity firmly lodged within the capitalistic system. This system is characterised in a structural way by inequalities which are socially considered to be legitimate, which have their origin at the level of production and which, at least in part, are compensated for by institutional mechanisms of redistributionâa redistribution, in turn, effected by a welfare system, which is ever more in a state of crisis, both in Italy and elsewhere.
In a context like this, the institution of residency is expected to carry out a function of statistical and administrative monitoring of the territory and of the population, such as is necessary to contain the effects of social and economic asymmetries. Identifying those who live in a determinate space permits, on the one hand, better allocating and redistributing the resources of welfare, and on the other, preventing, or simply repressing, phenomena of âdevianceâ also connected to the structural conditions of economic deprivation. To carry out this function, the registry offices must perform in a correct manner: this is to say, de jure residents must coincide with de facto residents.
The ambivalence of the civil registration thus intertwines with that of social policies. Monitoring and aid are superimposed on top of one another, to such an extent that it is difficult to distinguish between the two. As we will see more clearly below, with regard to certain categories of people, the procedures of enrolment perform not only a function of spatial control but also an activity of social control which simultaneously influences both mobility and individual behaviours. For homeless persons, for instance, aid is conditioned on a personâs continuous presence in a territory and on his/her readiness to exhibit an attitude which is considered âadequateâ.
Moreover, guaranteeing full correspondence between the de facto population and the de jure population is not always a priority for local administrations. In the most recent decades, numerous municipalities have effected more or less explicit and directâif wholly illegitimate in legal termsâstrategies to deny civil registration to individuals who, on the basis of state laws, have the right to it. In this way, municipal administrations have impeded the effective exercise of fundamental rights. The objective of these municipalitiesâwhich are not obstructed and sometimes are even abetted by central powersâseems to be the selection of the residents, realised by avoiding enrolling âundesirableâ persons in their registries.
The selection of those persons who are authorised to enter into a territory, to stay there and to obtain legal recognition there, is a phenomenon which has acquired growing importance over the course of the centuries. Up until the beginning of the modern age, there was a good deal of freedom of movement in space, above all in Europe. While entrance into cities, the centres of political and economic life, was often subject to restrictions, the requirements for entrance were not founded on the possession of legal status, but on the physical, economic and social characteristics of individuals and groups. With the beginning of the modern era, and then with the development of the capitalistic system, selection became ever more important. The proliferation of physical borders proceeded in tandem with the diffusion of status borders , which were less visible and menacing but not for that less effective in regulating the movement of persons. Membership statuses consequently acquired relevancy: mobility and the entitlement to rights progressively came to depend on the possession of a specific legal status, irrespective of other characteristics.
Citizenship is surely the most important status, insofar as it represents, both symbolically and materially, the centrality of states in the modern world and in the capitalistic system. But it is not the only status: in the course of the twentieth century, other forms of membership arose, forms less solid than citizenship. Stay permits, reserved by the states to foreign persons who intend to enter into their territories, constitute forms of partial legal recognition. The relevancy of these legal statuses, which was manifested over the course of the twentieth century, and in particular after the Second World War, reveals the ever more detailed control that the states have attempted to exercise on the freedom of movement of persons and on the recognition of rights to those who are not formally their members. More recently, other forms of membership statuses appeared on the scene: supranational citizenships, and in particular European citizenship , add a further level of regulation to the management of individual mobility and to the recognition of rights.
While state and supranational citizenships are more or less stable legal conditions, albeit revocable ones under certain conditions, other types of membership statuses are rather characterised by structural impermanence. This impermanence, historically, represents a strategic element: to render the legal condition of certain categories of persons unstable implies a restriction of their possibilities of autonomy. The casualisation of membership statuses constitutes therefore a key resource from the point of view of selective management of spatial mobility and of integration on the part of political actors.
From this perspective, residency, as compared to other forms of membership, constitutes an interesting window for observing the processes of inclusion and exclusion. Residency is indeed an intrinsically precarious status: it is connected to a personâs simple presence in a municipal territory or to the existence of significant interests on the part of that person within the same, and it disappears whenever the person in question abandons the territory or his/her interests there cease. Its precariousness, however, does not seem to be relevant on the political plane, since residency is the mere administrative recognition of material presence.
The refusal to grant residency, however, produces profound effects which are much broader than might appear at a first glance. Those persons to whom residency is denied, though they are not explicitly forced to leave a territory, are in any case induced to seek in another territory that recognition which they do not find in the municipality in which they live; or else, should they decide to remain there, they will be deprived of rights which they formally possess. Since they are deprived of municipal membership, their connection with the state and with the European Union is weakened: in the absence of civil registration, full access to healthcare or social services cannot be granted through the possession of a specific stay permit, or even of Italian citizenship. The legal statutes defined on the central and supernational level, therefore, can be emptied of their contents at the local level.
This book focuses on residency, employing it as the lens through which to understand wider processes. The use which various political actors make of civil registration in Italy is indeed very relevant to a number of subjects. The first of these is the question of borders. As can be seen from border studies, borders are not merely physical lines dividing politically diverse communities; they can also assume immaterial forms. This work intends to show how a certain use of civil registration produces administrative borders , embedded in persons in such a way as to âfollowâ ...
