Migrants' Participation in Exclusionary Contexts

From Subcultures to Radicalization

K. Pilati

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137553591
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137553607
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Social Sciences

This insightful book analyzes the political engagement and marginalization of three of Milan's migrant groups, Filipinos, Egyptians and Ecuadorians. Bringing together data relating to the civic and political engagement of individual migrants, and of migrant organizational networks, the result is an examination of the consequences of the political exclusion of migrants, exploring the different ways in which they cope with this predicament. Such exclusion, the author argues, has three major impacts. It can transform migrant groups into political subcultures and engender externally-driven participation, but it can also lead to radicalization.

1

Political Context and Organizations

Abstract: This introductory chapter illustrates the main research question behind this book: what are the alternative modalities of facing political exclusion of migrant groups in Europe? In this chapter, Pilati introduces her study on the political exclusion of three migrant groups, Filipinos, Egyptians and Ecuadorians in Milan, a city characterized by a moderately closed political context of migrant integration compared to other cities in Europe. In this chapter Pilati articulates the main hypothesis, arguing that the effect of an exclusionary context on political engagement is moderated by the level and type of organizational engagement and of organizational networks. Differences in these dimensions are likely to lead to different modalities of facing political exclusion.

Keywords: closed political context; Ecuadorians; Egyptians; Filipinos; immigration; Italy; Milan; organizational engagement; organizational networks; political exclusion

Pilati, Katia. Migrants’ Political Participation in Exclusionary Contexts: From Subcultures to Radicalization. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137553607.0004.

1.1Introduction

Political participation is at the center of the concept of the democratic state (Barnes et al. 1979: 28). Therefore, political exclusion of any subgroup of the population is dangerous for democracy. The political exclusion from activities such as voting, political contacts and taking part in demonstrations as well as the lack of collective actions threatens the equal protection and representation of groups’ interests, hinders the ability to take part in public affairs, lowers governments’ legitimacies, the acceptance of a democratic form of government, and the sense of collective responsibility and civic duty (Desposato & Norrander 2009; Heath, Fisher, Rosenblatt, Sanders & Sobolewska 2013: 3). The political exclusion of any segment of the population deserves thoughtful analysis, but political exclusion of individuals of migrant origin in Europe is particularly pertinent given the constantly increasing inflow of the foreign population to most European countries (Salt & Almeida 2006). The literature has so far highlighted that migrants’ political exclusion is particularly significant in closed political contexts, that is, in those contexts like Switzerland, Hungary or Italy that pose severe cultural and structural constraints on migrant integration. This results from the limited individual and collective rights granted to migrants (Ireland 1994; Koopmans & Statham 2000; Koopmans, Statham, Giugni & Passy 2005; Cinalli & Giugni 2011). Stating that a constraining political context to immigration leads to political exclusion may sound obvious, at least for anyone familiar with the conditions that many migrants experience in Italy (Calavita 2005). Italy is a country where migrants working in tomato, strawberry and grape plantations in the southern regions of Campania, Apulia and Sicily are paid €2, 50 per hour and work 10 hour days, thus earning a maximum €25–30 per day, in extremely harsh conditions.¹ Italy is a country that witnessed racial insults directed towards Italy’s first black minister Cécile Kashetu Kyenge in July 2013 when she was the Minister for Integration in the 2013–2014 Letta Cabinet. The insults came from Calderoli, a former minister and a member of the anti-immigration party Northern League. It is also a country where the freedom of religious faith clashes with common practices deeply embedded in a predominantly Catholic culture. As a Moroccan Muslim woman living in Brussels once told me in 2010: “I left Italy to move to Brussels after 8 years of residence in Villafranca, a village in the nearby of Verona, because my daughter had started to come home singing church songs learned in a public kindergarten, despite the fact that I had recurrently asked the teacher to avoid practices related to Catholic religion in the presence of my daughter.”² Italy is also a country where several politicians are under investigation for bid rigging for the management of Europe’s biggest reception center for refugees and asylum seekers in Mineo, Sicily, where migrants first arrive.

Such examples provide some snapshots of Italy’s overall multifaceted exclusionary context, both at the structural and at the cultural level, a context that prevents migrants from accessing mainstream social and political networks and power, shaping significant asymmetries between migrants and natives (Ambrosini 2013: 143). Backing these examples, there is solid evidence going in the same direction (Ambrosini & Abbatecola 2002; Reyneri 1998, 2004a, 2004b; Saraceno, Sartor & Sciortino 2013; Campomori & Caponio 2015): in fact, most migrants in Italy are employed in the most demeaning and menial jobs, and the foreign-born population is more likely to be overqualified in Italy than in other European countries (FRA 2011: 42). Italy has amongst the highest levels of racial discrimination: Eurobarometer survey data collected in 2008 shows that Italy has the lowest percentages of people feeling comfortable with having a neighbor from a different ethnic origin than their own (FRA 2011: 62).

Patterns of exclusion, segregation, inequalities and racism are certainly not exclusive to Italy and are present in other European countries. While I am writing this book, in summer 2015, European countries are debating over policies to adopt in order to deal with the increasing migrant flows. Just to cite a few examples, in Ventimiglia, a city on the Italian-French border, the French police are systematically expelling migrants who pass the Italian-French border, trying to reach Northern European countries. The French police are justifying their repressive actions through existing laws on refugee status. At the same time, Hungary is building a wall to keep arriving migrants away from Serbia. Migrants are targeting the Eurotunnel railway tunnel from Calais trying to reach the UK despite the deaths of several people since June 2015. In this environment of hostility towards migration which is common to European countries, Italy does however represent amongst one of the closest political contexts towards immigration (Cinalli & Giugni 2011).³

The current evidence on political exclusion of migrants in Italy and in other closed political contexts is substantial (Eggert & Giugni 2010; Pilati 2010; Gonzalez-Ferrer 2011; Morales & Pilati 2011). Extant literature shows that political exclusion is especially evident in political contexts characterized by an ethnic view of citizenship. In countries where the principle of jus sanguinis prevails over other requirements for acquiring citizenship, most migrants without the citizenship of the countries where they settle are foreigners (Koopmans & Statham 2000; Koopmans et al. 2005). In such contexts, segregating practices in terms of having access to the representative and the participatory dimensions of politics are structured, first of all, at the institutional level by excluding foreign migrants from voting at the national and, often, at the local level. Migrants living in countries with ethnic conceptions of citizenship or closed political opportunity structures (POS) such as Switzerland also have significantly lower opportunities to mobilize in the political sphere through protest activities in comparison to those residing in countries with a more open POS like Great Britain and France (Ireland 1994; Koopmans et al. 2005: 78–79; Bloemraad 2006: 684; Gonzalez-Ferrer 2011). Closed political contexts exclude migrants through a number of constraints related to those resources necessary to mobilize people, inter-alia, lower access to upward mobility, lower political legitimation, and hinder the capacity to share broad collective identities based on cross-cutting ties.

However, there are also reasons to believe that a closed political context may not be the only reason underneath political exclusion. In addition to the institutional context of reception, the literature has shown a multiplicity of other factors that need to be taken into account in order to understand patterns of political engagement.⁴ Next to the institutional constraints or opportunities, scholars have shown the crucial role of organizational structures, an element which may somehow counterbalance the institutional dimension. Although most migrants in Italy are foreigners without active or passive voting rights, and they occupy the lowest levels of socio-economic positions and experience high levels of discrimination, they may lean on organizational resources enabling them to overcome institutional constraints, and to sustain their engagement in various types of political activities. Resources derived from organizational engagement and organizational structures are indeed extremely helpful for individual engagement in political activities and collective actions (Diani 2015).⁵ Therefore, whilst institutional constraints may prevent migrants from political inclusion, there are factors which may enable migrant actors to find ways to cope with such constraints. Empirical studies have shown that the local structure of migrant organizations in closed political contexts tends to lack strength. Organizations tend to be weakly engaged in political activities, and to be marginalized compared to native organizations (Pilati 2012; Eggert 2014; Eggert & Pilati 2014). Moreover, migrants show lower levels of organizational engagement than natives (Voicu & Comşa 2014). As a result, in closed political contexts both institutional constraints and a weak organizational structure tend to contribute to the marginalization of migrants from political activities. While equal opportunities to access and participate in the political sphere is a normative and shared condition of all citizens of a state, this is not true for many migrants living in an exclusionary context such as Italy.

In this framework, research on possible alternative modalities used by migrants from different ethnic groups to deal with an exclusionary context remains scant. This book aims to fill this gap. This research leaves aside the extremely harsh conditions experienced by many migrants in Southern Italy (Pugliese 2013), focusing instead on one of the most economically wealthy and prosperous cities in Europe, Milan. Despite this, Milan and its surrounding region, Lombardy, can still be considered one of the most exclusionary contexts for migrants’ integration in Europe (Ambrosini 2013). The book examines organizational engagement and political engagement of Filipinos, Egyptians and Ecuadorians, three major ethnic communities in Milan. In addition, it takes into account the organizational networks and the political engagement of migrant organizations. By combining insights from analyses of individual and organizational data the book demonstrates that political exclusion is not experienced equally by Filipino, Egyptian and Ecuadorian migrants. Certainly, political exclusion is common to the three groups: results show that political engagement is extremely low among migrants of all the three groups examined, both compared to migrants in other European cities and compared to natives in Milan. On closer examination, however, migrant groups end up displaying different modalities to cope with being excluded: political marginalization may engender the ethnic social closure of migrant groups into political subcultures characterized by social closure towards the majority as well as towards other migrant groups; it may lead to externally-driven participation, in particular, to modalities of reaching the political sphere by engaging in political actions by linking to mainstream actors; or it may create cultures of opposition leading to the radicalization of the repertoires of actions. Thus, the main research questions addressed in the book are the following: What are the possible consequences of an exclusionary context on migrants’ modalities of political involvement? How does the effect of different organizational structures and levels as well as types of organizational engagement combine with constraints of an exclusionary context? Under what conditions does an exclusionary context lead to the emergence of political subcultures and dynamics of social closure? When and how does it instead lead to participation, including the most contentious forms of participation such as protests?

I argue that the effect of an exclusionary context on political engagement is moderated by the intermediate level of organizations. Following a neo-Tocquevillian approach, I build on studies that relate civic associational activity to outcomes such as an increased likelihood of participating in various types of political activities (Verba, Schlozman & Brady 1995; in the migration literature see Berger et al. 2004; Jacobs, Phalet & Swyngedouw 2004; Tillie 2004; Togeby 2004; Wong, Lien & Conway 2005; Barreto, Manzano, Ramirez & Rim 2009; Hochschild & Mollenkopf 2009; Aleksynska 2011; Morales & Pilati 2011; Strömblad & Adman 2011; Strömblad, Myrberg & Bengtsson 2011; Heath et al. 2013). In addition to these accounts, however, I conceive organizations, in particular, organizational networks and the resources they deploy for political engagement, as strictly intertwined with state institutions (Kesler & Bloemraad 2010; de Graauw, Gleeson & Bloemraad 2013; Eggert & Pilati 2014). I therefore expect that the type of organizational affiliations and organizational structures will moderate the relationship between a closed political context and political engagement. Considering both individual affiliations within organizations and networks among organizations, I argue that exclusionary contexts affect different patterns of exclusion from the political sphere, therefore leading to political subcultures, native-driven political engagement or forms of radicalization depending on the specific individual and organizational ties built by migrant actors.

1.2The object of study

I focus on migrants’ political engagement looking at specific behavioral dimensions. My aim is to understand the degree to which migrants are able to reach the political sphere, either individually or through activities enacted by migrant organizations. More broadly, my goal is to investigate to what extent migrants are able to make their voices heard, to defend their identities and interests, to claim rights, to participate in decision making processes, and to potentially influence policy making. Differently from traditional approaches in political science literature, which consider attitudes as a crucial dimensions of political engagement, I pay less attention to them. Therefore, I do not delve into migrants’ patterns of intentions, the attachments they develop towards Italian politics, nor to their interests towards Italian politics. These attitudes are, however, crucial for the development of the predispositions to act, and in affecting the ways migrants eventually engage in the political sphere. Therefore, this study will consider interests towards Italian politics when discussing factors affecting political behaviors.

This study unfolds at two levels, individual and organizational. At the individual level, I look at individual political engagement in different types of activities. I also examine how engagement in different types of organizations affects political activities. At the organizational level, I look at organizational networks and at organizational political activities.

When I examine individual political engagement, I focus on activities relating to political objects or actors, or those aiming to change or to resist a change to the status quo (see van Deth 2014 for a discussion on the definition of political participation). In this framework, I do not analyze voting patterns because most migrants in Italy, including Milan, are excluded from this major institutional channel of participation. I, therefore, focus on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Political Context and Organizations
• 2  A Multifaceted Exclusionary Context in Milan
• 3  Comparing Migrants and Natives in Milan, and Migrants in Milan and in Other European Cities
• 4  Linking Civic and Political Engagement
• 5  Organizational Networks and Political Engagement of Organizations
• Conclusions
• Methodological Appendix
• References
• Index