Out of Albania

From Crisis Migration to Social Inclusion in Italy

Russell King, Nicola Mai

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781845458645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Analysing the dynamics of the post-1990 Albanian migration to Italy, this book is the first major study of one of Europe's newest, most dramatic yet least understood migrations. It takes a close look at migrants' employment, housing and social exclusion in Italy, as well as the process of return migration to Albania. The research described in the book challenges the pervasive stereotype of the "bad Albanian" and, through in-depth fieldwork on Albanian communities in Italy and back in Albania, provides rich insights into the Albanian experience of migration, settlement and return in both their positive and their negative aspects.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Out of Albania

In the Silver Jubilee volume of the International Migration Review, Aristide Zolberg (1989: 405) opined that, if all the world consisted of Albania on the one hand and Japan on the other, there would be no need to study international migration, for it would not exist. Two years later, the world watched agog as pictures of thousands of fleeing Albanians crammed on to creaking ships dominated the newspapers and television screens for a few days in March 1991. Later that same year, in August, similar scenes were reenacted as another exodus of Albanian ‘boat people’ bore down on the coast of southern Italy. The pictures of the impossibly crowded ships containing the Albanian refugees desperate to escape a country collapsing into political and economic chaos became part of the iconography of global migration in the 1990s. The scene was cynically made into an advertising poster by the Italian clothing giant Benetton, it featured on the front cover of Myron Weiner’s provocative book The Global Migration Crisis (1995), and it was reissued and replayed in countless magazine articles and television documentaries on migration.

In a sense this Albanian imagery was unfortunate. Whilst not wishing to deny the human drama and tragedy of Albanian migration, we suggest that most migration, even Albanian migration, does not take place in this way. As Castles and Miller make clear in their landmark study The Age of Migration, contemporary international migration is (and probably always has been) an infinitely complex and diversified phenomenon, deeply embedded within social and economic processes operating at a variety of scales. Since earliest times, migration has been a constant factor in human history, not an aberration or a crisis (Castles and Miller 2003: 278). People migrate as manual workers, trained specialists, students, entrepreneurs, or as family members of previous migrants. Some move as refugees, others have choice. For many poor people, however, choice is constrained: migration presents itself as the ‘best option’ for economic survival and improvement. All this rings true in the Albanian case, as we shall see in the pages that follow. In fact one of the key findings of this study is precisely the diversity and dynamism of the Albanian migratory experience.

The timing of Zolberg’s remark was, of course, critical. His paper, ambitiously titled ‘The next waves: migration theory for a changing world’, was attempting to identify new theoretical frameworks that would help to explain the ‘new waves’ of migration beginning to emerge in the 1980s. What he could not anticipate was that 1989 would open up a new era of international migration in Europe – across the old migration barrier of the Iron Curtain. Yet here we find the first of a number of paradoxes concerning Albanian migration. It was widely thought at the time that the dismantling of the Iron Curtain would trigger a mass migration (Fassmann and Münz 1994; Layard et al. 1992). The logic of such a view was predicated partly on the recollection that the Iron Curtain had been initially created to contain westward migration from the Warsaw Pact countries, and partly on the fact that the immediate impetus for the breaching of the Hungarian barbed wire in May 1989 and of the Berlin Wall six months later was to allow Hungarians and East Germans to step into ‘freedom’. Further strength for the view of impending mass migration derived from the obvious economic divide between East and West and from the presumed eagerness of much of the former’s population to go and taste the hitherto forbidden fruits of capitalism.

By and large the threat of mass East–West migration failed to translate into reality. It is true, nevertheless, that a considerable amount of mobility has occurred. In Germany there have been the migrations of Übersiedler and Aussiedler – respectively migration from East to West Germany in the year between the knocking down of the Berlin Wall and unification, and migration into Germany of ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. There has been a fairly large-scale but geographically dispersed emigration from Poland, which had its origins in the somewhat more liberal attitude of the Polish communists towards travel abroad before 1989, and which has been boosted by Poland’s accession to the EU in 2004. New systems of cross-frontier shuttle migration have sprung up, such as that between Poland and Germany, or Slovakia and Austria. More recently, there have been substantial migration flows from Romania, Moldova and the Ukraine; much of this is directed towards the newer countries of immigration along the southern flank of the European Union – Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece. Yet most residents of the Warsaw Pact countries have been reluctant to tear up their roots.

The one undisputed case of massive East–West migration is that from Albania, the focus of this book. During the early 1990s around 10 per cent of the Albanian population emigrated, the vast majority of them to two neighbouring EU countries, Italy and Greece. By 2001, according to the Albanian Census, a net total of 600,000 Albanians had moved abroad in the previous decade, representing nearly 20 per cent of the Albanian population (INSTAT 2002). Some authorities, however, estimated the scale of the emigration loss as even higher, around 800,000 (Barjaba 2000a). Probably no other country in the world, certainly in Europe, was so deeply affected by emigration during the 1990s. The outflow has continued in the new decade, and by the end of 2004 the Albanian government estimated that one million Albanians were living abroad.

About the Book

This book explores the dynamics of Albanian migration since 1990, primarily to Italy but with some comparative reference to Greece and other countries. Based on the available statistics and on more than two hundred in-depth interviews in Italy and Albania, we explore the evolution of Albanian migration and settlement in Italy and impacts on the ‘sending country’, Albania. We look closely at migrants’ employment, housing and social conditions in Italy, as well as actual and potential return to Albania. The study pays particular attention to the complex processes of social exclusion and inclusion and to the changing ways in which the host society has reacted to the immigration of significant numbers of Albanians (who are thought to number around 250,000 in Italy). Our analysis will show how the initial construction of Albanian migration as an ‘heroic event’ – of fellow Europeans escaping the terrible yoke of communism – was quickly replaced by a very different view based on a set of powerfully negative stereotypes. We will critically document, evaluate and deconstruct the discourses surrounding these stereotypes and, using a variety of field research methods, describe how Albanians have negotiated their way through and around various dimensions of stigmatisation, discrimination and exclusion. The final major theme we address in this study is the question of identity, particularly insofar as this is related on the one hand to the stigmatising narratives and behaviours imposed by Italian society, and on the other to the disruptive events in Albania where the exit from the nationalist-communist articulation of Albanianness destabilised existing notions of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’.

Let us spell out our research questions and hypotheses in a more systematic fashion. The research had two major aims:

1. To build up a detailed profile of the Albanian migration to Italy encompassing migration processes, experiences of employment and housing, social networks and community structures.

2. To examine and to attempt to theorise the processes through which the stigmatisation and social and economic exclusion of Albanians have occurred and are constructed in Italian society.

More specific research questions nested within or extending from the two general aims include the following:

• What are the demographic characteristics of Albanian migration, and specifically that to Italy? Here we are interested in numbers, age, gender and family structures, geographical origins within Albania, spatial patterning of settlement in Italy, and return migration. How have these characteristics changed over time?

• In what ways have Albanians been able to access employment in Italy; to what extent are they excluded from some types of job and confined to others; and to what extent are they engaged in illegal and semi-illegal activities? In relation to the existing literature on migrants and labour markets in Italy and southern Europe which shows the tendency of migrant workers to cluster in certain (often nationality-and gender-specific) niches in the parallel or informal economy (e.g., Baldwin-Edwards and Arango 1999; Iosifides and King 1996; Mingione and Quassoli 2000; Reyneri 1998), how do Albanians fare in comparison and in competition with other migrant groups? Have Albanian workers been able to improve their working situations the longer they stay in Italy?

• What are Albanians’ housing and other social conditions in Italy, including their access to welfare, education and other ‘citizenship rights’? Again, how have these housing and other social conditions changed over time?

• How have discourses of racism against Albanians evolved? What has been the role of the Italian media in stereotyping Albanians as ‘undesirables’, ‘criminals’ and ‘others’? What are the other dimensions of everyday and institutional racism against Albanians? Extending this line of analysis further, how can the Albanian experience in Italy be theorised in relation to existing studies of the ethnic and racial aspects of migration? This is of particular interest because skin colour is clearly not a signifier of racism in the Albanian case, thereby confirming the position of Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1993) that any signifier, whether biological, cultural, linguistic or religious, can be used to construct ‘racialised boundaries’, and that ‘hierarchies of whiteness’ exist. Hence the importance of exploring how racism is experienced by Albanians in Italy, both as an intentional representation and as intersubjective prejudice.

• Building on the above questions, what are the dimensions of inclusion and exclusion experienced by Albanians in Italy, and how have they reacted to these conditions by drawing on their own social networks and cultural resources to combat racism, victimisation and stigmatisation? What has been the role of such networks in carving spaces of control and in building bridges between home and the host country? How have notions of Albanian community and solidarity been constructed? Here we must bear in mind that this construction has taken place across the abrupt post-communist transformation. With the demise of the communist state there was a general collapse of a collective moral, social and cultural universe, to some extent replaced by a foreign media-induced construction of a good life based on individualised and consumer-oriented values. Hence the most striking aspect of contemporary Albanian culture, especially during the first post-communist years, has been its chaotic fragmentation and its failure to find a secure, shared ontological foundation to fill the vacuum left by the disappearance of the collective and the public as meaningful and all-pervasive bases for culture, economy and society. Similarly, in approaching the question of Albanian identificatory responses to victimisation and stigmatisation, it will be important to understand how Albanians’ rejection of the communist celebration of nationalistic identity makes them potentially more likely to assimilate and interiorise a stereotypical and stigmatising description of themselves.

• Finally, what is the role of the ‘Albanian background’ in helping to understand migrant behaviour at various stages of the migration process, including return? We think this question is relevant at three levels. First, there are deep-seated traditions such as patriarchy, blood feud and the clan structure which, partially suppressed by communism, have resurfaced and taken on new forms since 1990. Secondly, there are more specific factors such as the breakdown of the Albanian collective system in the early 1990s, or the collapse of a series of pyramid investment schemes in 1997, which have acted as triggers for waves of Albanian emigration. Thirdly, there is the issue of the extent to which the current state of the Albanian economy, society and political system acts as an encouragement or, more likely, a barrier to return migration.

In working through the above research objectives and questions, a number of comparative dimensions will be introduced. Based on existing literature, some comparisons will be made firstly between Albanians in Italy and those in other countries, notably Greece; and secondly with other immigrant nationalities in Italy. A third comparative axis will be the regional contrasts of the Albanian experience within Italy: as will be seen in the next section of this chapter, the field methodology was set up explicitly to take this into account. Throughout our analysis, we will be sensitive to gender contrasts and to the danger of viewing Albanian migrants as an homogenous entity, or as simplistically dichotomised good/bad, criminal/non-criminal, legalised/undocumented, etc. As we will see, exclusion and inclusion are never absolute, but dynamic, contextual and differentiated.

Methods

Our approach is interdisciplinary, methodologically diverse and multisited. We are certainly not alone in believing that the best research on migration is ‘intrinsically interdisciplinary’ (Castles and Miller 2003: 21). This points us both in the direction of a combination and an integration of different disciplinary perspectives, and towards a variety of methods to gather data. Our research takes inspiration from Robin Cohen’s eloquent words in the Prologue to his monumental Cambridge Survey of World Migration. Cohen (1995: 8) writes of his conviction that:

the study of migration confirms, par excellence, the newer emphasis in the social sciences and the humanities on commensurability and mutual intelligibility across disciplines. This is witnessed in the increasing number of scholars who work comfortably across disciplinary divides … The newer notion assumes that a consensus is emerging around social and cultural anthropology, law, sociology, politics, philosophy, economics (where humans still matter), history, human and population geography, social psychology and other cognate fields too numerous to mention … [T]his new-found transparency should not be a licence for an ‘anything goes’ type of scholarship. Instead, systematic investigation, rigorous method, appropriate language skills, a combination of empathy and critical distance from the subject, attention to sources and to related research all acquire a new importance.

Our research approach in this study of Albanian migration to Italy is based around the cluster of disciplines made up of human geography, sociology, anthropology, and cultural and media studies, but we also bring in, where relevant, perspectives from history, politics, economics and psychology.

In addition to surveying a rapidly expanding literature on Albanian migration – evidence of a growing scholarly interest in the uniqueness, diversity and significance of the country’s migratory experience¹ – we have kept a watchful eye on relevant official datasets. After a shaky start in the early 1990s, when much Albanian migration went unrecorded, the statistical hold over the dimensions and characteristics of the flows and settlement patterns, especially in Italy, has become more secure with the passage of time – as will become clear in Chapter 3.

Field Sites in Italy

Whilst the statistical picture is important in framing the broad outlines of Albanian migration and in providing the backdrop to our study, the main methodology we employ is based on extensive field research and in-depth interviewing. Field interviews were concentrated in three locations in Italy, in order to differentiate migrants’ experiences in contrasting socioeconomic settings (Figure 1.1). These were:

• Lecce and the region of Apulia in southern Italy. Apulia (Puglia in Italian) occupies the south-east corner of Italy and contains the coastal cities of Bari and Brindisi where the 1991 arrivals of Albanian ‘boat pe...