Invisible Borders: Administrative Barriers and Citizenship in the Italian Municipalities [2020 ed.] 9783030538354

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PALGRAVE POLITICS OF IDENTITY AND CITIZENSHIP

Invisible Borders Administrative Barriers and Citizenship in the Italian Municipalities Enrico Gargiulo

Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series

Series Editors Varun Uberoi Brunel University London London, UK Nasar Meer University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK Tariq Modood University of Bristol Bristol, UK

The politics of identity and citizenship has assumed increasing importance as our polities have become significantly more culturally, ethnically and religiously diverse. Different types of scholars, including philosophers, sociologists, political scientists and historians make contributions to this field and this series showcases a variety of innovative contributions to it. Focusing on a range of different countries, and utilizing the insights of different disciplines, the series helps to illuminate an increasingly controversial area of research and titles in it will be of interest to a number of audiences including scholars, students and other interested individuals. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14670

Enrico Gargiulo

Invisible Borders Administrative Barriers and Citizenship in the Italian Municipalities

Enrico Gargiulo Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna Bologna, Italy

Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series ISBN 978-3-030-53835-4    ISBN 978-3-030-53836-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53836-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Getty Images © artpartner-images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Anna, everyday

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all those friends and colleagues without whom this book would not have been possible. During the years of my research on residency, some of them have read my works and offered suggestions, others have criticised them, and still others have ‘simply’ dedicated me their time by listening to my research obsessions, chatting, and sharing ideas. There are many of them, too many, and so I cannot mention all by name to tell how grateful I am for their support. I am sorry for this. Writing this book would not have been conceivable without all the people I have interviewed, observed, read, and listened to. I am particularly grateful to the members of the pro bono organisations that defend migrants’ and homeless people’s rights with whom I have been in touch during these years, as well as the political activists and occupiers who struggle day by day for a better world. Their tireless hard work has been an example and an inspiration for me. I am extremely grateful for the help and the patience shown by my editors at Palgrave Macmillan—Sharla Plant, Poppy Hull, Ruby Panigrahi—and the series editors of Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series: Varun Uberoi, Nasar Meer, and Tariq Modood. I am thankful as well to the production team and Project Manager Vanipriya Manohar at SPi Global for their excellent work during the final stages of proofing, editing, and printing. A special thanks to the two anonymous vii

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reviewers who took the time to read and comment on the proposal form and the first draft of the manuscript. Moreover, I am obliged towards John Bruce Leonard for his linguistic help and consultancy. Last, but not least, I want to thank my partner, Anna, my parents, Armando and Mirella, and my brother, Alessandro: without their longstanding encouragement, this book, as well as a lot of other things, would not have been possible.

Praise for Invisible Borders “While the legal concepts of (un)authorized presence and citizenship in bounded territorial states govern how we envision “immigrants” and debate their treatment, this perceptive book raises novel issues. Local residency registration, studied with rich material from Italy, regulates access to socially distributed resources and shapes stratification of labor. The case made in this book is original, penetrating, and theoretically insightful. Scholars of migration will want to read this exceptional work.” —Josiah Heyman, University of Texas at El Paso, USA “Enrico Gargiulo has made an important addition to our sociological understanding of the ways in which states and individuals relate to one another. The humble, often taken-for-granted status of “resident” turns out to be a major pathway to rights and privileges for individuals who have it; those without it may be legal non-persons who barely exist in the eyes of the state. This book is a major contribution to our expanding appreciation of the many kinds of borders, both physical and conceptual, that shape our relationships with the social and political world.” —John Torpey, Presidential Professor of Sociology and History, Director, Ralph Bunche, Institute for International Studies, CUNY Graduate Center, USA

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Varieties of Borders 13 3 The Borders of Local Citizenship 53 4 Residency and Its Meanings101 5 The Functions of Residency135 6 Administrative Borders169 7 Administrative Borders, between Effects and Forms of Resistance205 8 Conclusive Remarks: What Is at Stake in Residency?243 References251 Index273 xi

List of Tables

Table 6.1 Typology of the mechanisms of exclusion from residency Table 6.2 Typology of the (illegitimate) modalities of residency denial Table 7.1 Typology of the local population with right to civil registration for citizenship and residency

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1 Introduction

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. One’s having been enrolled in the registration office of a municipality is normally considered a banality and is almost taken for granted: all people—one tends to believe—are 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 person’s 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 to—or else perceives himself/herself constrained to— modify his/her registrational status, and thus faces probable queues at the offices of the local administration. Realisation that the full enjoyment of © The Author(s) 2021 E. Gargiulo, Invisible Borders, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53836-1_1

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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 one’s request, one’s 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 negation—through legal or often simply bureaucratic channels—of fundamental rights recognised by state and regional laws. One’s 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 “experts”, 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 principal—if not the only—aim 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 mobility—which 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.

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Within the Italian system, residency is therefore a necessary instrument for the construction of a path of individual “autonomy”, 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 “political” 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 “political” 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 redistribution—a 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 “deviance” 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

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influences both mobility and individual behaviours. For homeless persons, for instance, aid is conditioned on a person’s continuous presence in a territory and on his/her readiness to exhibit an attitude which is considered “adequate”. 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 direct—if wholly illegitimate in legal terms—strategies 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 municipalities—which are not obstructed and sometimes are even abetted by central powers—seems to be the selection of the residents, realised by avoiding enrolling “undesirable” 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

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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 person’s 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

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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 “follow” them, obstructing or abetting their movement and regulating their access to rights. The study of how residency is concretely managed in Italy thus contributes to the study of what forms and what effects status borders— which is to say, borders of a non-territorial type—might assume and produce. Moreover, this book adds elements to the analyses on the concept of urban citizenship. In Italy, there exists a legal status of local membership, presenting very clear characteristics on the legal level, and presenting very often specific functions as well. This notwithstanding, this status is often employed in a discretionary manner by the local authorities and has been subject over the years to attempts on the part of central governments to change it, all of which threatens to distort its original function. The Italian case, however, shows what are, in theory, the functions and the objectives of local citizenship, and what are, on the other hand, the practical uses and abuses that the ruling governments, both national and local, might make of it. In this way, the analysis of residency in Italy carries concreteness to a rather vibrant theoretical debate. Finally, this book furnishes analytical elements for studies on the mechanisms of control of mobility and on the effects that these mechanisms produce on the social structure. More specifically, the legal and administrative technologies for regulating residency form measures that exacerbate the level of civic stratification and facilitate a differential

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inclusion. As we will see more clearly further on, the persons to whom civil registration is denied, being deprived of the status of local citizens, see their state-level status of recognition weakened along with it: two foreigners who have the same stay permit, and who are therefore equal from the point of view of their condition of semi-membership in the Italian state, find themselves occupying different positions on the scale of stratification if one of them is granted residency and the other is not. These persons, moreover, if they continue to live in the territories in which they are not formally recognised, find themselves in a situation of inferiority and of potential subordination, being deprived of access to services and benefits to which they have the right. At the time I was concluding this book, the COVID-19 emergency exploded in Italy. The reaction of the Italian government and public institutions turned—as in other countries—upon severe limitations of personal liberties and freedom of movement. Urgency decrees and ordinances have been issued to this end: the health emergency has immediately been confronted through the juridical logic of legal emergency. The political and legal actions which have been carried out in this period of time—and which, very probably, will be conducted in the next months, or in some cases will become permanent—concern issues such as shaping people’s behaviours and monitoring and tracking their movements, and consequently involve devices like registers and residency, raising important questions about the relation between political power and individuals. Methodologically, the book contains a theoretical analysis of several concepts, focusing primarily on “status borders” and “memberships statuses”. In this, it follows a historical-sociological approach, accounting for the meanings of these two categories by stressing their historical functions and showing what is at stake in their use. Furthermore, this book thoroughly analyses the legal status of residency existing in Italy. To this end, it follows a research path based on processes of exclusion from residency at the municipal level. The material is rather varied and has been obtained through a range of investigative strategies: the analysis of political discourses (from official documents and media releases), the analysis of documents (ordinances, circulars and by-laws), interviews and telephone conversations (with key informants— lawyers and members of pro bono organisations—local civil servants,

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occupiers and activists of housing right movements) and relevant data pertaining to the municipal level. More specifically, the research underlying the present work began in 2010 with a focus on the procedures of exclusion from civil registration adopted by numerous municipal administrations since 2007. Procedures of this sort, which were often very visible and widely advertised by the media, became particularly common after the issuance of the so-called Security Package in 2008, which increased mayoral ordinance power. At this stage, my research chiefly concerned the content of the measures and provisions adopted by local administrations and the categories of subjects involved. Given the lack of any complete and official catalogue, I collected the texts of ordinances, by-laws and mayoral circulars relating to the issue of residency, partly by drawing upon the work previously carried out by another researcher (Lorenzetti, 2009). In this way, I was able to peruse the texts of around 100 provisions and documents. No specific geographical criterion was followed in collecting these texts. However, it soon became clear that the overwhelming number of texts came from municipalities in Lombardy and Veneto. I therefore chose to focus my attention on these two regions. The focus of my research then shifted to the actual application of these measures and provisions for exclusion. The question became: do these ordinances and other policies serve exclusively as a tool of propaganda— despite their potential indirect material repercussions—or are they meant to concretely exclude people? In an attempt to answer this question, I contacted ninety-five of the municipal administrations that had issued by-laws, ordinances or circulars concerning residency. Forty-five replied and provided the requested information, namely, the number of rejected applications for enrolment in the civil registry in the years 2007–2013, the provenance of the applicants, the reasons for their rejection and the paperwork used for the verifications. In order to better interpret this data, telephone calls were made to civil servants and employees from roughly half of the municipalities involved. The municipal staff were asked to provide details concerning the procedures followed for the recording—or non-recording—of the rejections. At the same time, interviews were carried out with eight key informants:

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trade unionists, members of organisations and lawyers who were active in contrasting the measures of exclusion carried out by the municipalities involved in my data collection. Later, I enlarged the number of interviews by talking to four occupants and activists who were denied registration on the base of Art. 5 of the Housing Plan of 2014. I selected them on the basis of their active involvement in contrasting the effects of this law. In this way, I have had the possibility to explore the coping strategies of people facing the lack of residency. After the introduction, this book is divided into other six chapters and conclusive remarks. The second chapter delves into the question of borders, illustrating the various meanings of this term. It takes as its object above all the distinction between territorial borders and status borders. Subsequently, the concept of territorial membership is defined. This concept indicates a formal status that establishes a relationship between a person and a territory, producing a status border which, however, has implications for a person’s relationship with space. The functions of membership statuses are then described. More specifically, attention is focused on the procedures of registration, identification and control of mobility. The concept of civic stratification is then introduced—a concept used as a key to understanding the foremost dynamics connected to residency and to its denial. Finally, the ways population has been historically shaped through demographic devices and submitted to a policing activity are illustrated. The third chapter focuses on the concept of local citizenship. In the first part, the multilevel system of membership statuses that characterises the European context is described. Immediately after, it is shown how this system, characterised by an elevated level of civic stratification, includes persons in a differential manner. There follows a dedicated analysis of the politico-economical reasons for this kind of inclusion, describing the basic traits of the regime of statuses that has taken form within the capitalistic system. The second part focuses instead on the concept of local citizenship, its various meanings and the historical experiences of internal mobility and of formal recognition of persons at the municipal level.

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The fourth chapter takes as its object the forms of membership statuses in Italy. After having illustrated in detail the legal functioning of residency, we focus our attention on the extra-legal meanings and contents of this status. Subsequently, the slow process that led to the institution of a civil registry in the Italian state is retraced, departing from the first origins and arriving at the recent novelties introduced by the Salvini Decree. In conclusion, the discourse moves to the dispute surrounding the meanings of the legal categories and their application, from which enormous effects derive in terms of the recognition of persons. The fifth chapter analyses the functions of residency in Italy. Specifically, it is shown how civil registration corresponds to a duty and, at the same time, a right for the better part of those persons who are present on the territory or who have significant interests within it. Subsequently, this chapter illustrates the reasoning governing the pathways of registration and the implications of civil registration. This chapter proceeds then with a description of the chain of command in the procedures of civil registration, underlining who are the key actors and what is their formal role. The last part emphasises how residency is an instrument favouring welfare and, at the same time, how it is an instrument consenting control of the population. The sixth chapter illustrates the administrative borders that have been created in Italy on account of the control of residency. In the first place, it is shown how civil registration contributes to population design and how it is used by the institutional actors for a variety of reasons and toward a variety of objectives. The history of exclusion from residency is then briefly recounted in the context of Italy over the past few decades. We turn our attention then to the mechanisms of exclusion from the civil registry: their function is analysed in detail, and characteristics of the individual forms of denial of civil registration are also emphasised. This chapter concludes with focus on administrative discretion and on the role that technico-administrative measures have in pursuing political objectives. The seventh chapter concentrates on the effects brought about by exclusion from residency, and on the forms of resistance that excluded persons might effect. The first part analyses the objectives of the administrative mechanisms and highlights the social categories which are

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subject to discrimination, illustrating in detail the kind of separation that is produced. Subsequently, our focus moves to the reaction that exclusion from residency arouses in the denied persons themselves. Towards the end of better clarifying the broader scope of the regulation of local citizenship being carried out in Italy, the second part of the chapter then presents a brief excursus into other states, highlighting the way in which residency is regulated, and the institutional actors involved in civil registration in contexts like China, the United States and Spain. In conclusion, the diverse principles and issues which are at stake in the regulation of residency are precisely stressed and synthesised. Conclusive remarks highlight the two main stakes in the control of residency. The first concerns the legal formalisation of the relationship between individual and territory on the local level. The second relates to the visibility and the invisibility of certain persons and to the implications of a variety of related choices surrounding that.

Reference Lorenzetti, A. (2009). Il difficile equilibrio fra diritti di libertà e diritto alla sicurezza. In A. Lorenzetti & S. Rossi (Eds.), Le ordinanze sindacali in materia di sicurezza pubblica e sicurezza urbana. Origini, contenuti, limiti (pp. 191–266). Napoli: Jovene.

2 Varieties of Borders

2.1 From Territorial to Status Borders Borders are very important in the contemporary world. Of course, they have been important in other historical periods as well, but the way they shape space and human relations now is quite specific. After the discourses and analysis on the end of the state and national divisions which were widespread during the nineties (Badie, 1995; Derlugian, 1996; Kennedy, 1993), we currently face a global political environment strongly made of boundaries at different levels. In the European context, the borders of the European Union are segmented and not always visible, but they are pervasive and effective nonetheless to people from non-European countries who try to cross them. In other areas of the world—Cono Sur, for example—similar obstacles to movement prevent migrants, both from other parts of the same continent or from other continents altogether, from reaching the states that are part of the alliance. At the state level, walls or other kinds of barriers are often put up against migrants. These borders act both in a physical and in a legal way, by preventing people from entering the territory of a state or making it strongly difficult to them to remain within it. At the local level, © The Author(s) 2021 E. Gargiulo, Invisible Borders, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53836-1_2

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registration devices are in some cases used to recognise irregular migrants and to give them rights, while in other cases they are utilised to exclude even regular migrants from the actual enjoyment of benefits and services to which they are entitled according to supranational and national laws. The division lines mentioned here are quite different from one another and take various forms and characteristics (Heyman & Symons, 2012; Tazzioli, 2019; Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, & Cassidy, 2019). Principally, they are material means of separation. Visible and tangible obstacles, such as fences, barriers, barbwires, often supplied with technological systems of detection and surveillance, are spread across the entire globe and perform various functions. Their main purpose is to separate spaces and communities which are held to be mutually exclusive. In this way, they give shape to a territory by surrounding and distinguishing it from others. Modern states, territorially delimited and internally sovereign, are the strongest and most evident manifestation of this power of separation and distinction (Tilly, 1975). The affirmation of state borders is the result of a slow process, one which unfolded between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age and assumed a stable form in 1648, with the peace of Westphalia. This diplomatic act ratified the recognition of states as legitimate actors in governing and administering territories and populations. But modern states are not the only agents to have recourse to material separations. Supranational political actors can also put up barriers against people coming from outside (Rigo, 2005; Walters, 2002). In this case, borders are drawn by their peripheral states, working as an external protection for the entire union. In the past, local political actors, particularly cities and towns, were also delimited by boundaries, which often took the form of a wall and were aimed at keeping out undesired people. Division lines, moreover, can be immaterial, drawn by legal tools. Laws and regulations concerning the entry and stay of non-citizens within a foreign territory, defining their status and governing their obtainment of citizenship, act as borders. These legal boundaries establish who has the partial or total right to formal inclusion within a community. They do not have to do with the space itself, but rather focus on the people who live within it. Immaterial division lines can also be made of administrative tools. Provisions, acts and simple bureaucratic practices produce effects similar to those provoked by laws and regulation, even though they are

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not supposed to directly affect the rights of non-citizens. Thus, these administrative lines contribute to shaping the legal condition of people. More generally, borders make up a key tool in governing a territory and the people linked to it. As an effect of their presence and action, only some individuals are authorised to cross the line separating one political community from others. Such authorisation is realised under specific conditions, and is established and defined by the authority that is sovereign on that territory. Those who satisfy the requirements provided for by laws and regulations obtain a formal title allowing them to enter and/or to lengthen their stay, while others do not obtain this title. Borders, therefore, more than being rough means that produce a blunt separation, act as filters or membranes, which separate the desirable from the undesirable, the genuine from the bogus, the deserving from the undeserving (Anderson, 2013; Bonizzoni, 2020; Chauvin & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2012, 2014; Mezzadra, 2001). In doing their work, borders reveal a two-side nature: they can be territorial or non-territorial (Cuttitta, 2015). Recovering the concept of “exclusivity of space” proposed by Georg Simmel, Paolo Cuttitta distinguishes the social formations that “have an exclusive relationship with a clearly delimited territory; therefore we can’t even imagine the co-­ existence of another social formation of the same kind on the same territory at the same time” from those which are not in themselves “related to any territory in a way that excludes the co-existence of other formations of the same kind on that territory” (ibid., p.  242). According to this scholar, non-territorial social formations “include any category whose members share the same status, the same condition, be it state citizenship, juridical status, ethnic origin, religious faith, economic condition, education, familial status, professional or language skills, etc.” (ibid., p.  243). Basically, all these immaterial lines “are therefore nothing but status borders: the borders represented by individual or collective conditions (for example working position and financial status can determine whether a national from country A will be granted a tourist visa to enter country B), or the borders defining such individual or collective conditions (for example the rules specifying what jobs and what income levels should be taken as a reference to determine whether to grant a visa or not)” (ibidem).

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Status borders play a strategic role in the contemporary world. Indeed, although they might not spatially separate people, they nonetheless cause social segmentation and stratification (Bigo, 2014; Paasi, 1998; Rumford, 2006; Salter, 2008; Van Houtum & Van Naerssen, 2001; Walters, 2002). But not all status borders produce the same consequences: some are more effective and pervasive, while others are less powerful in stratifying and segregating. In other words, status borders are not a homogeneous set of things. There is a huge difference between social positions formally established by some law or regulation, on the one hand, and social positions defined rather by norms which have no juridical meaning, on the other. This book aims to focus exclusively on formal status borders, stressing their uses (and abuses), their manifest and hidden purposes, and the effects they produce on certain categories of people. The starting point for reflection on the devices analysed in this work is that even though they do not delimit space, they are still able to prevent people from moving freely within it. In other words, territory is at stake in the functioning of those status borders which express a territorial membership. More specifically, territorial memberships are status borders that, however, also have spatial relevance: since they furnish legal recognition, they also grant freedom of movement, either in a broad or in a restrictive sense. In other words, by legally distinguishing between different individuals, they control the mobility of the same, given that the availability of a certain status is connected to the possibility of moving from one territorial area to another. These measures therefore mark a particular kind of perimeter, which is both legal (directly) and spatial (indirectly). The definition of territorial membership introduced in Chap. 1 places space at the centre, as a criterion of cohesion, even with reference to persons who are displaced elsewhere. Two different kinds of borders therefore influence territorial memberships. The first delimit the space on which the authority conferring membership exercises its jurisdiction, and they take on either the semblance of physical or legal barriers that impede free circulation or of requirements for entry and stay. These measures, rather than circumscribing a membership in a strict sense, delineate its territory of reference by specifying who, and under what conditions, can enter it and stay within it. The second

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kind of borders define the criteria that define the recognition of the member’s status, translating concretely into legal and administrative instruments that grant a certain formal status and the exercise of rights. These measures directly circumscribe membership, insofar as they legally permit a clear separation between who is within and who is without, establish the extension and intension of society, delineate its criteria of access and clarify the rights and duties of members. Overall, these two types of borders are extremely different from one another: a wall, a fence or barbwire1 appear as “objects” which differ from an entrance permit; while an entry permit, in its turn, does not particularly resemble the administrative regulation which defines requirements for the conversion of a stay permit from the status of “temporary” to that of “permanent”. All kinds of borders, however, manifest an explicit degree of formalisation, as they are the product of legal regulations. Yet, their concrete functioning can differ from the same: the mechanisms in which they arise often follow a different reasoning than the legal.

2.2 Territory and Membership Statuses Every person who is linked to a territory is subordinated to the authority that rules over it and administers the activities necessary to the reproduction of the society which is located within its borders. Such an authority is exercised on both space and people. In other words, governing the territory and governing individuals are not two distinct expressions of political power, but are rather interrelated forms of it (Elden, 2013; Williams, 2006). First, to manage the relation between territory and people means to confer on individuals a status establishing that they are formally members of a political community. This status may assume different gradations, being more or less limited, both in terms of obligations and recognitions, and may have various durations. Furthermore, the relation between territory and people can take various forms, material when individuals are physically present, or virtual if they are at a distance. Indeed, in order to obtain formal membership, a person is not obliged to be spatially located within the territorial area under jurisdiction. One can be a member of a

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community without having crossed its borders, just as one can spend years within it without obtaining recognition of one’s membership. Second, to govern the relation between territory and people means to confer rights on some categories of individuals while denying them to others. This selective process can be inspired by two opposite ways of thinking: binding rights to the status of full membership on the one hand, or, on the other, recognising them regardless of the ownership of this formal position. Concretely, the two ways of thinking tend to overlap. Some rights are reserved to the full members of a community—for example, the right to vote, or the right to be voted for, in political elections is a prerogative of citizens—but other rights are extended to people who have a partial membership—especially, civil liberties and social provisions and benefits—and even to those who are not recognised at all— even irregular migrants are usually granted emergency health assistance. Moreover, the attribution of rights might or might not be linked to a person’s mere physical presence within the territory: for a citizen, moving away from the space of the community of which he/she is part could entail the maintenance of the right to vote but, at the same time, the (temporary) revocation of the right to full health assistance. The authority exerted by political actors therefore defines itself symbolically and becomes material by conferring on people a certain legal status and linking a given set of rights to that status. It means attributing to each individual a specific formal recognition, namely a territorial membership. This is a juridical relation that links a person and a territory when he/she becomes part of the political community located within it (Dinelli, 2011). Territory thus forms the criterion of cohesion, even when membership is independent from a person’s material presence on that territory. In other words, formally “entering” a political community does not necessarily mean standing in a material relation with the spatial domain over which political institutions exert their jurisdiction. As an effect of the application of the ius sanguinis principle, one can be recognised as a citizen of a state even though one has never been within its territory. Similarly, according to some state regulations, it is possible to be recognised as a formal resident by a municipality without living on a constant basis within its borders.

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There are several kinds of territorial membership. Within the modern world-system (Wallerstein, 1974)—that is a space occupied by states which are sovereign in a mutually exclusive way over terrestrial portions of the globe—national citizenship is the most important form of territorial membership. It legally formalises the closer relation between a person and a state. At the same level, there are other forms of state membership—or better, partial membership—which are neither as strict nor as stable as citizenship. The different kinds of stay permit granted to non-­ citizens are less lasting forms of recognition: since they are basically temporary—even though they can be converted into permanent permits under certain conditions—they can be revoked for security reasons. Territorial memberships can also be supranational and local. The former formalise the link between an individual and a macro-regional territory wider than that of a single state. Among this kind of membership, the most articulated and solid is located in the European context; it is called EU citizenship, and embraces all the citizens of the states that make up the Union. This is an additional and not a substitutional status: it does not erase national memberships, but rather integrates them. More specifically, EU citizenship does not strictly define the relation between a person belonging to a European state and the macro-regional political entity, but regulates their status with respect to the other countries which are members of the EU (Dinelli, 2011, p. 247). More than a form of citizenship, it is a formal condition of being a “privileged foreigner” (Cartabia, 1995, p. 3). The exclusivity of this status becomes clearer if one looks at the composition of the European polity. Its members are those belonging to a state, regardless of their place of residence, and not those who merely reside within EU territory. Therefore, the country to which a person belongs is absolutely qualifying in determining his/her condition as an EU member. In other words, EU citizenship is a status grounded on state membership and not on residence within EU borders. The logic sustaining it is formal rather than material, stressing the legal fact of citizenship in certain countries and not the substantial fact of living in the European territory. EU citizenship is thus a sort of exclusive club. Its members are people who have already been selected by the single European states,

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which, according to their unquestionable criteria, autonomously regulate entry in their territories and the attribution of formal membership. State territorial memberships formalise the relation between a person and a state. Citizenship is the stricter form of legal recognition. But to say it again, there are other forms of partial membership which are neither as strict nor as stable as citizenship. Citizenship is a constitutive condition: all the people living on the planet Earth basically belong to at least one state.2 This form of membership draws a line between those who are entitled to be members of a state society, even when they reside abroad, and those who are not, even if they live within its borders. Historically, it has emerged when “the plurality of hierarchical bonds was replaced with an exclusive identity based upon membership in a common territorial space with a singular centre and established territorial boundaries defined by the sovereign powers and recognized as such within a developing international state system” (Neocleous, 2003, p. 99). The criteria that establish and legitimate citizenship are therefore juridical and symbolical devices aiming at conferring recognition and formal membership on the individuals who are considered to be members (Costa, 2005; Grosso, 1997; Isin & Turner, 2002; Mindus, 2014; Turner & Hamilton, 1994; Zolo, 1994). Citizenship therefore is the technology par excellence for regulating the processes of inclusion in, and exclusion from, a collectivity (Brubaker, 1992; Bosniak, 2006) and for shaping the composition of its population (Hindess, 2000; Tintori, 2015). In order to be legitimised, this status founds its action on certain principles and views of society, and these in turn result in different criteria of recognition (Gonzales & Sigona, 2017). They regulate the acquisition and transmission of the status of citizen, taking a variety of names depending on the logic that governs them: ius sanguinis, ius soli, ius domicilii, ius connubii, ius culturae. Concretely speaking, the various logics intersect and overlap, given that in many countries more criteria are simultaneously employed. They express different ideas on the relation between individual and territory. Ius sanguinis presupposes a non-material link: it is possible for one born outside a state’s borders to acquire citizenship within it, even without crossing those same borders. Indeed, this status is transmitted by descent from a person that already holds it, in the absence of any

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territorial rooting. On the contrary, ius soli entails a foundational relation between person and space: presence in a territory at the moment of birth is the title for obtaining membership, regardless of blood ties. Despite the differences between the two principles—the first is based on ancestry, while the second rests on territorial bonds—both of them share the premise that the circumstances surrounding birth play a crucial role in determining political membership (Greblo, 2018, p. 77). In other words, it is the persons from whom one descends or, alternatively, the place where one was born which “impresses” citizenship. The other principles rest on different criteria. Ius domicilii follows a strictly territorial logic, considering a prolonged and continuous relation with the territory of the state to be central. After a certain number of years of legal residence, an individual becomes a citizen by being “naturalised”. Ius connubii stresses the link with a person who is already a member of the society within which one strives to become a member. A certain period of marriage—the length of which can change depending on whether the applicant is or is not living together with his/her spouse and whether he/she is residing within state territory—provides access to citizenship. Ius culturae concentrates on the educational path taken within the host society. School attendance is the condition for conferring membership to a minor. The recognition of those who live within the territory of a state without being full members thereof takes other forms, and these are less complete than citizenship. In contrast to citizenship, partial memberships are not constitutive but accessory: host states provide those who come from abroad a kind of membership that accompanies their national memberships, allowing them to stay within the borders of the host state. More specifically, partial memberships draw the line between those who are authorised to enter and stay in the territory of a state and those who are not. Under certain conditions they become permanent, and hence more difficult to revoke. When this happens, the status of partial membership takes a form quite similar to citizenship: the denizen is the long-term resident foreigner, holding an open-ended permit to stay. In contrast to citizenship, no great variety of important rights, relative to the sphere of political participation and of freedom of movement, is connected to partial membership. The political field, in particular, is

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considered the prerogative of members in the full social sense: the right to vote is generally reserved to citizens. Even denizens are excluded from the right to vote, at least in political elections. Exceptions are made in some systems for local votes. In the European context, for example, the Strasbourg Convention on the participation of foreigners in local-level public life, approved by numerous states, aims at favouring active and passive electorate in municipal elections. So far as European citizens go, the right to vote locally is recognised to those who stay in an EU country different from that in which they have citizenship, and this right extends itself to elections for the EU Parliament. The right to full mobility is also limited for those who are not fully members of a state (Heath Wellman & Cole, 2011). The ability to move within the borders of one’s country of residency is theoretically guaranteed, although it is often concretely conditioned, while the possibility to enter and leave the state space is limited where it is not even impeded. Partial memberships rest on principles and visions of society that justify and legitimate an incomplete legal inclusion, and they transform into different recognition criteria. These can vary quite a lot, going from expansive to restrictive, general to categorial, conditioned to unconditioned. Concretely speaking, individual countries follow a mixture of the different criteria. Moreover, the regulation of entry and stay might concern non-citizens as such or it might focus on specific categories of non-­ citizens as workers, minors, women, skilled professionals, and so on. Finally, the conferment of a partial membership can be free from any request or it can be dependent on the fulfilment of certain requirements: as, for example, knowing the language and civic values of the host country, being willing to follow training courses or do community services, having a certain income, and so on. Local territorial memberships recognise those who live in a municipal territory. These kinds of statuses vary considerably from state to state. Some countries do not have formal recognitions at the local level, while others meticulously formalise the presence of individuals within the borders of each municipality. In any case, the relation between a person and a territory is integrative: municipal authorities confer on individuals a status establishing their possession of a material or simply a virtual link with the municipal community.

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Local memberships draw a line between those who are physically present in a municipality or who have relevant interests within it and those who have only sporadic relations with that territory. Compared to state memberships, and especially to citizenship, these kinds of formal recognitions are definitely less lasting. Their length basically coincides with that of the effective link between people and municipal territories: when this link fails, the membership is revoked, being replaced by registration in another municipality, either domestic or, if the interested person has moved abroad, foreign. The possibility of effectively exercising numerous rights is connected to municipal memberships. These do not derive from the condition of resident in the formal sense, even if a certain number of years of residency might constitute a factor entitling one to access to statuses, services and benefits. Nevertheless, for administrative reasons, the enjoyment of such memberships depends on this same condition. Municipal memberships therefore do not constitute a “right to have rights” in the strict sense, but rather they constitute a “right to exercise other rights”: among them, social and healthcare assistance, access to residential public housing, the release of identification documents and the possibility of participating in elections. Local memberships therefore play a strategic role, as they translate supranational and national memberships into more concrete statuses and make the rights connected to them concretely exercisable. In doing their work, these forms of legal recognition do not rest on specific principles and visions of society. Their legitimation is given by the practical need to know what persons occupy a territory, or in any case what persons are linked to it, and to ensure access to public benefits and services. More specifically, the logic underlying local memberships is that of collecting information, for administrative purposes, on all the relations—be they permanent or temporary, material or virtual—between people and municipal territories. This logic can take expansive or restrictive forms: registration can include all the people who are present within a municipal territory, regardless of whether they have a stay permit, or it can be reserved to those who are regularly residents in the country. Depending on the criterion chosen by a local administration, municipal membership

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embraces the entire municipal population or just a part of it, for example, its ‘legal’ component or some specific categories of it.

2.3 Knowing, Recognising, Identifying Territorial membership statuses basically perform two functions: recognising and knowing people who are linked to a territory. This link can coincide with material presence or, on the contrary, can be independent of spatial rooting. Recognising means conferring a formal status, and hence takes on different meanings at the various levels to which it applies. At the supranational level, it is equivalent to providing a second-level legal position, establishing that, within a Union of states, those who belong to one of the member countries ipso facto also belong to the entire Union. At the national level, it means conferring a full or partial state membership.3 At the local level, it results in granting those who reside or are domiciled in a municipality the status of local citizens. Knowing means locating people living in a territory or having some interests within it so as to register their presence, map their movements and acquire information about their characteristics. Depending on the degree of scale one considers, to localise individuals means to focus on different traits and features and to fulfil various purposes. At the supranational level, locating those who are within the supranational space is serviceable to the achievement of policies concerning a wide set of topics: for example, sustainable development (United Nations, 2014). At the state level, monitoring those who cross state borders and remain within national territory hinges on checking their nationality status and stay permit, and is considered strategic for guaranteeing security and public order, as well as for allocating welfare resources among different areas of the country and diverse categories of the population. At the local level, information regarding those who permanently live in the municipal territory, or those who identify within it the centre of their affairs and interests, is acquired through civil registries. By means of the registration of individuals and families, local authorities are able to make several services—among them, social assistance, health assistance, public

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housing, etc.—actually available, to collect local taxes and to map the position of single individuals within municipal space. The function related to knowing entails that related to recognition: to identify the people who are in a certain space or who find in that space their principal interests means to collect information on certain of their characteristics, including citizenship. Identifying is the same as matching the material or virtual presence of a person with a set of physical, demographic, socioeconomic and legal data, which make that person distinctively recognisable. In this way, every person, once located in the territory, is conferred her/his own unique administrative identity. Identification is an ambivalent process; it betrays certain coercive traits, and yet at the same time, it is the precondition for the recognition and demanding of rights. This ambivalence is clearly illustrated by the literature on identifying procedures. As underlined by Buono (2014), the studies on identification basically follow two different approaches. The first, based on the works of Foucault and Weber, focuses on the surveillance exercised by states and the construction of administratively classifiable and knowable individuals (Caplan & Torpey, 2001; Noiriel, 1998; Torpey, 1998, 2019, and, with some relevant differences, About, Brown, & Lonergan, 2013). The second rests on the experiences of non-­European countries, and hinges on the notion of registration as a gateway to rights (Breckenridge & Szreter, 2012). From the first perspective, to identify means to make societies legible and more easily governable (Scott, 1998). The establishment of maps, censuses, fixed surnames, cadastral mapping and land registries is equal to an action of complexity reduction through which diversities among people are compressed and administrative procedures are standardised. In this way, also thanks to the development of writing (Goody, 1986), states can reach a level of knowledge which is more functional to a “modern” and efficient management of their core activities. More specifically, identification makes populations and territories visible to the eyes of the state authorities. Just as knowing those who live in a territory means counting them and acquiring information on their main characteristics, bringing spaces out of darkness and into the light means illuminating roads, squares, alleys and buildings. Not surprisingly, the interest in the public illumination of city spaces historically goes in hand with the interest in

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city planning and the geometrical building of urban spaces and neighbourhoods (Edensor, 2017; Isenstadt, Maile Petty, & Neumann, 2015). The same interest in individuals leads to the activities of attributing them names and enumerating their features, which allows one to know unequivocally who a given individual is. Such activities produce forms of bureaucratic inscription, namely social and material dynamics through which people are inscribed into official bureaucratic systems at various scales of government and, hence, are made visible to a field of power (Horton & Heyman, 2020). Identificatory practices are forms of intrusiveness on the part of the institutions. As Torpey observes, they have consequently stressed this element: “previous sociological discussion of the development of modern states has focused attention primarily on their growing capacity to ‘penetrate’ or ‘reach into’ societies and extract from them what they need in order to survive. Discussions of states as ‘penetrating’ societies more effectively during the modern period can be found in almost any major recent sociological discussion of the nature of modern states” (Torpey, 2019, p. 12). But this imagery of societies, being “penetrated” by the state, is somehow critical: The “penetrationist” approach has had little to say about the mechanisms adopted and employed by states to construct and sustain enduring relationships between themselves and their subjects, the “social base” of their reproduction. The metaphor of the “penetration” of societies by states thus distorts the nature of the process whereby states have amassed the capacity to reconfigure social life by focusing our attention almost exclusively on the notion that states “rise up” above and surmount the isolated societies that seem, in this metaphor, to lie prostrate beneath them. Willingly or unwillingly, the now-standard imagery of penetration suggests that more or less weak societies simply receive the advances of more or less powerful states. (ibid., p. 13)

Instead of this penetrationist approach, Torpey suggests a different imagery, based on the idea that states “embrace societies, ‘surrounding’ and ‘taking hold’ of their members—individually and collectively—as those states grow larger and more administratively adept. More than this,

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states must embrace societies in order to penetrate them effectively. Individuals who remain beyond the embrace of the state necessarily represent a limit on its penetration. The reach of the state, in other words, cannot exceed its grasp” (ibid., pp. 13–14). In contrast to the image of penetration, that of embracing4 “directs our awareness to the ways in which states bound—and in certain senses even ‘nurture’—the societies they hold in their clutches” (ibid., p. 14). In this way, Torpey deals with part of the complexity and ambivalence surrounding the processes of identification. His terminological and theoretical choice reduces the distance standing between his work and that of Breckenridge and Szreter, who explicitly criticise the Weberian and Foucaultian approach characterising the studies on identification. From their perspective, these studies need some methodological and substantial innovations in order to grasp the actual purposes and effects of the state identificatory activities. To obtain these innovations, Breckenridge and Szreter broaden their vision beyond Europe and North America, moving towards Africa, Asia and Latin America, where there are areas in which, even today, a considerable part of the population is not registered. Furthermore, they question the epistemological break between a pre-­ modern world, characterised by orality, and a modern world, dominated by writing. Within their work, the current centrality of the oral dimension in the everyday work of institutions is clearly and meticulously shown. But the most interesting aspect of their proposal resides in the distinction between enumeration and registration. According to Breckenridge and Szreter, both enumeration and registration can be viewed, from a state perspective, as just different forms of human accounting (Breckenridge & Szreter, 2012, p.  18). But registration, unlike enumeration, is often more valuable, or at least as useful, to individual citizens, as to the state. It has the potential to provide a legal technology and resource for individuals which strengthens civic society: a strong state which creates a registration system can be legally empowering of its citizens, rather than disempowering; and this diffused power in the hands of citizens does not equate with any particular form of knowledge sought by or useful to the state. (ibid., p. 7)

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More specifically, registration can involve quite the opposite process to the command and control logic of enumeration. Enumeration and all census-like activities (including the making by authorities of certain kinds of lists of named individuals which are often called “registers”, such as the twentieth-century population registers of the Netherlands) are, by definition, unilateral interventions by governmental agencies to extract defined items of information for administrative and policy purposes. By contrast, that form of registration involved in the process of determining inclusion or exclusion of recognition of membership in a defined collectivity can entail—and often has entailed—a much more bilateral process, in which the aims and interests of the person being registered may play a significant role. (ibid., p. 19)

Therefore, while enumeration concerns passive populations, registration entails an active role by individuals who are registered. They can be more or less collaborative and sincere in giving information about their characteristics; they can negotiate the identification process, and, in some cases, move it in a desired direction. As the official acknowledgement of an individual’s existence and identity, registration plays a strategic role in the better part of the world’s states: it is usually necessary for access to welfare and, more generally, for the exercise of rights whenever proof of one’s possession of these rights is required (Breckenridge & Szreter, 2012, p. 22). Basically, “registration—official recognition of existence and an identity—is the grounding and basis for personhood and human rights” (ibid., p. 22). Thus, from Breckenridge and Szreter’s perspective, registration, as opposed to enumeration, is not a matter of control, restriction and surveillance, but has to do strictly with autonomy and emancipation. This distinction is pretty sound and has the great merit of framing identification as a more complex institution. However, it conceals the fact that the double dichotomy enumeration-registration/passive-active does not necessarily adhere to the reality of the procedures of identification. In Italy, as we will see below, civil registration has the function of enumerating the population in a dynamic way, and, at the same time, of registering persons with the aim of rendering possible the exercise of their rights. It is

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therefore a measure which assumes an active role, in all its phases, on the part of residents: to determine what information must necessarily be conferred on the authorities affects not only the possibility of having access to benefits and services but also the quality of the representation of the population furnished by the registry offices. Enumeration and registration are therefore complementary rather than alternative activities. The case of the Italian civil registry moreover betrays the presence of another border surrounding the spaces of individual actions: the local authorities, in their relations with applicants for registration, exercise de facto an elevated level of discretionary power, forming asymmetrical relations between institutions and the users thereof and producing exclusionary consequences. There is thus a relatively limited space for negotiation for the persons interested. As for other forms of bureaucratic inscription (Horton & Heyman, 2020), in the case of civil registration—as we will better see in Chap. 7—the people who get in touch with local authorities if on the one hand have the opportunity to deal with administrative power on the other are exposed to several specific risks.

2.4 Selecting and Stratifying Identification is decisive for determining who is authorised to stay within the territory and who is not. The distinction between “legal” and “illegal” does not precede but rather follows from the institution of measures for control: it is not the presence of a sans-papiers which brings about the use of identifying instruments, but it is rather the standing legislation on the latter which brings the former to exist. In other words, “illegality” is legally and politically produced by states and other political actors (De Genova, 2005). The “identificatory revolution” which affected many European states towards the end of the nineteenth century marked the advent of papers and codes and made the production of distinctions for administrative ends a central element of the government of populations and territories (Noiriel, 1996, 1991) by decreeing the legal emergence of the status of “regular” migrants and of “irregular” migrants. Membership statuses, therefore, serve the ends (beyond of knowledge-­ gathering and recognition) of regulating the mobility of individuals and

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groups. It is no accident that documents are connected to these formal memberships which, to varying degrees, guarantee and establish the freedom of movement.5 The most important document, from this point of view, is the passport, reserved to the citizens of states but attributed also, in specific cases and under a different form of title to travel, to those possessing international protection and to stateless persons: the border between those who belong to the nation and those who are not a part of it even though they live within it can be continually verified and re-­ established by means of this document (Torpey, 2019). There then follow, in order of importance, documents of identification, the best known of which is the identity card, which can be conferred on all residents— usually, but not necessarily, in a “legal”6 way—in the state territory.7 Moreover, identification, as it is essential to decisions regarding the categories of persons granted leave to stay, demonstrates how the attention of the public institutions has historically been directed towards particular categories of the population (Torpey, 2019, p.  15). Control, discipline and identification are almost never neutral and horizontal processes, but rather present a vertical and selective nature. These processes tend to concentrate on certain categories of persons, excluding others, thus giving place to a hierarchy of statuses and privileges in terms of immunity from the interference of public powers. The members of a community are generally not subject to particularly stringent identity checks, at least so long as they do not belong to certain categories which are consider to be at risk or “dangerous”, while foreigners are subjected to often obsessive verifications, to such an extent that their identity is broadly determined by legal and administrative procedures: as Noiriel observes, it is moulded by the documents and practices of registration (Noiriel, 1996, p. 45). The procedures of identification fall within a broader and more complex set of measures for managing mobility. To understand the reasoning and functioning of these measures, it is useful to understand the concept of mechanisms of immigration control proposed by Grete Brochmann (Brochmann, 1998, pp. 25–30). These measures can be external or internal: both can be imagined as continuous states which, however, for simplicity’s sake, can be reduced to discrete units and can even be dichotomised. Every set of controls is thus subdivisible—bearing in mind

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that this subdivision is never clean-cut—into an explicit dimension and an implicit dimension: the first has to do with official policies, the second rather concerns hidden or little evident mechanisms of control and, at the same time, all the more or less systemic forms of distorted or partial applications of the legislation (ibid., p. 26). The explicit dimension is by definition manifest, visible; the implicit dimension, on the other hand, is often hidden and shows itself publicly only on certain occasions (ibid.). Examples of explicit external controls, according to Brochmann, are given by legal and police measures for border control, as well as by technological systems for identifying persons and by programmes of development support aimed at containing emigration. Examples of explicit internal controls, on the other hand, are furnished by the verifications made by law enforcement to redress limits to border controls, by intercepting individuals who have illegally entered, or who, though they have entered regularly, have remained within the territory beyond the valid period of their stay permits. The mechanisms regulating access to certain benefits, for example, social rights, can also be enumerated among the measures of this kind, since they permit one to identify irregular immigrants. The objective is not the prevention of non-authorised immigration but the possibility of making stay more difficult for persons who are in this condition. Mechanisms of a general type—those which act, that is, to an equal extent on both citizens and non-citizens—can also permit the exercise of specific forms of control over these latter. An example of this is the fines brought against employers who employ irregular personnel: these fines, which affect irregular work, even that done by regular citizens, end up affecting foreigners devoid of stay permits above all. Finally, a form of explicit internal control which acts directly on non-citizens is represented by legislation on the question of “naturalisation”, which is to say, the acquisition of citizenship. Passing on from the explicit dimension to the implicit, it is once again possible to speak of external and internal controls. The first are represented above all by fallible and inefficient border controls. According to Brochmann, the fact that, notwithstanding the laws and the mechanisms of regulation, a considerable number of persons able to cross the line separating two states can surely be explained with reference to the inconsistency of restrictions and to the elevated degree of arbitrariness which

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characterises their application, but it can be traced back above all to the considerable presence of humanitarian values in the society of arrival, which act as deterrents to the stringent enforcement of immigration laws. Implicit external controls are also represented by the redefinition of the concept of refugee and by the introduction of the notion of a “safe third country”, through which the burden of reception is transferred to other states. Measures of the external kind are represented, on the other hand, by social closure to foreigners—which can transform, in some cases, into genuine discrimination—by prohibiting refugees and those requesting asylum from working, which renders non-citizens dependent on the services of the welfare state. Membership statuses are in some way mechanisms of migration control, both internal and external. All together, they constitute a system of multilevel control, within which the different levels are highly interrelated: the mechanisms which are activated at a lower level can constitute internal instruments if they are activated at a higher level. The restrictions on the acquisition of citizenship actuated by a European state, for instance, provoke effects on the status of the EU citizen, rendering its attainment more difficult. At the same time, the limitations of residency practised by many municipalities weaken formal statuses at the state and supranational level. In a system of multilevel membership, therefore, the same mechanism of exclusion, or of partial and selective inclusion, can be external or internal, depending on the prospective from which one observes, the ends which it contains, and, above all, the effects that it might produce, irrespective of the intentions of those who have activated it. Membership statuses, moreover, are both explicit and implicit mechanisms of migration control. Simultaneously, as the multilevel system of membership statuses descends lower, proceeding towards forms of local membership, measures and strategies of an informal kind ever more accompany formal instruments in regulating the recognition of statuses and the exercise of related rights. As will be shown more clearly below through a detailed analysis of the question of residency and of the strategies adopted to deny it in an illegitimate way, the management of membership is characterised by the improper use of acts, administrative

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measures and wholly invisible bureaucratic practices which leave no trace whatsoever. This system of multilevel status memberships has seen important changes in the last decades. These changes are quite similar to those undergone by territorial borders. Indeed, within a neoliberal scenario, we are witnessing a multiplication of borders (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013), which manifests not only in the production of new material barriers protecting territories but also by means of the introduction of legal and administrative obstacles preventing migrants from obtaining formal statuses or making it difficult for them to keep those statuses. After all, as stated by David Harvey (2001), capitalism has always flourished by producing difference. And apropos of this, the diversification of the formal positions that link individuals to states and other political actors has become an even more strategic tool of governance than it was in the past. The diversification of capitalist societies, and more specifically of the territorial and non-territorial borders surrounding and crossing them, is well captured by the concept of civic stratification (Lockwood, 1996; Morris, 2002, 2003), which expresses the idea of a society made of many legal statuses, different from each other and vertically organised. This notion was introduced by David Lockwood in order to understand the “ways in which the structuring of life chances and social identities is the direct or indirect result of the institutionalization of citizenship under conditions of social and economic inequality” (Lockwood, 1996, p. 532). More specifically, the British sociologist was concerned with describing what happens in a society in which “because of the establishment of the common legal status of citizenship, all that remains of hierarchical status is the weaker form of social inclusion and exclusion”, and as a consequence “there is no well-defined hierarchy of rank or status in relation to which a given distribution of wealth or other sort of power could, except in a very weak sense, be deemed incongruous” (ibid., p. 533). In such a social scenario, the formal status of citizenship, together with the unequal distribution of resources, produces “four fairly distinct kinds of situations and interests which have a direct bearing on the understanding of class formation and social order more generally” (ibid., p. 536): Lockwood uses the expression “citizenship rights” for denoting full membership when the same existing rights are shared by all the members

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of the community, and for indicating a less complete membership if new rights are desired but not yet achieved or if there is a lack of existing rights. Moreover, he talks about “moral and material resources” to refer to advantages or disadvantages “conferred by social standing and social networks, command of information, and general know-how, including the ability to attain one’s ends through the activation of shared moral sentiments, whether or not the actor’s orientation to such standards is sincere or disingenuous” (ibid.). More specifically, the structure of civic stratification can take different forms. Civic gain “refers to the various ways in which legal, formally universal entitlements confer unequal benefits on citizens according to their ability to make use of them” (ibid., p. 541), while civic deficit concerns “either to a situation in which a lack of resources prevents the exercise of rights that are formally enjoyed or to one in which the exercise of rights is derogating” (ibid., p.  537). Moreover, civic expansion is an enlargement, in terms of rights, civil liberties, freedom of information, consumer protection and democratic participation, while civic exclusion occurs when some social categories are formally denied full citizenship rights or when their existing rights are abrogated (ibid.). Some years after the work of Lockwood, Lydia Morris recovered his concept of civic stratification, albeit by considerably changing its meaning. In her interpretation, hierarchical structures are no longer an issue internal to the realm of citizenship, but they rather have to do with the entire system of formal statuses that state and supranational legal systems contain. Within such systems, there are full and partial, permanent and temporary, forms of membership. Therefore, stratification is produced by the fact that the single formal positions are not equal, being vertically ordered. According to Morris, civic stratification is “a system of inequality based on the relationship between different categories of individuals and the state, and the rights thereby granted or denied. Central to such a system are the formal inclusions and exclusions which operate with respect to eligibility for rights and the informal gains and deficits that shape delivery” (Morris, 2002, p. 7). Besides managing rights, civic stratification has to do with acquiring information on parts of the population: “the

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elaboration of rights for categories of noncitizen also provides the opportunity and the means for exercising surveillance and control” (ibid.).

2.5 Demographic Tools as Political Devices Supranational and state memberships explicitly focus on the dimension of recognition and the control of mobility. The criteria which govern the acquisition of European citizenship and of full membership in individual states, just as the authorisation to stay, contribute, in a conjunct and synergetic way, to conditioning the composition of the resident society, thereby producing demographic effects. Taking up the jargon of public law, which distinguishes between population—composed by the whole of individuals who live on a territory independent of their citizenship—and the people—constituted by the citizens of a political community—it can be asserted that these forms of membership regulate the equilibrium between the first and the second. Given a specific system of authorisation to stay, if citizenship is based on restrictive principles, the people will be of smaller dimensions than the overall population: that is to say, the number of citizens is clearly inferior to the number of total residents. If on the contrary citizenship is founded on expansive criteria, the divergence between the first and the second tends to narrow. The balance between overall population and people can vary to the extent that the rules governing access to a territory on the part of non-­ citizens are limiting or extensive. Given a certain system of recognition and concession of citizenship, in those situations in which the laws on immigration are oriented towards inclusion, the first tends to expand as compared to the second. When these laws are rather aimed at exclusion, population—or at least legal population—is sure to contract, until it coincides, in the hypothetical case of totally “blocked” immigration, with the people. European citizenship and state memberships are therefore founded on an intrinsically political logic, not a territorial and administrative one. As we have already seen, the status civitatis is the technology par excellence of regulation for processes of inclusion/exclusion in/from society.

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Consequently, this status does not have as its direct objective the recognition of all individuals present on the state territory. Furthermore, to obtain information relative to all those who are in possession of citizenship status furnishes no indication whatsoever as to the spatial location of these persons: those who are members of a state in a formal sense might find themselves outside of its borders for long periods of time—even for an entire lifetime—without for this reason losing the legal condition of full membership. The forms of supranational and state membership, moreover, govern freedom of movement. Citizenship acts directly with respect to the members of society, authorising them to cross borders or else impeding them from doing the same: historically, states have exercised their power with respect to their citizens both in one sense and in the other. The status enjoyed by a state actor in the framework of international relations subsequently determines the facility with which its members are capable of crossing the borders of other states: the system of passports and of stay permits, which has arisen over the course of the modern age and which was consolidated towards the end of the nineteenth century and the first twenty years of the twentieth, gives rise to a strict and strongly asymmetrical way of managing mobility. Local memberships, though they have a function similar to state memberships, are noticeably different from them, from various points of view. These forms of membership indeed have a predominately knowledge-­ gathering function: their objective is to guarantee as complete and full a correspondence as possible between the de facto population—the persons materially present on a given territory—and the de jure population—the individuals who are formally registered in that territory. More specifically, local recognition is subordinated to the needs of conscience and thus has a less “political” content as compared to state recognition: to attribute municipal membership to a person does not mean to confer on the same person the quality of a member, in the full sense, of a community; it is rather equivalent to revealing his/her spatial position and to verifying the existence of his/her essential interests in the territory in question. The bond between a person and a municipality, generally speaking, is provisional and changeable. This provisional and changeable quality is connate to the idea of local membership: one is a

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formal member of a municipal administration so long as one dwells or has specific interests within its borders; the moment one moves or changes domicile, one’s membership changes as well. In this sense, the forms of local recognition are less political than state forms: what ties an individual to a territory is not a bond founded on some idea of social or cultural commonality, but rather the centrality, in the material and affective sense, of a given space. The logic of local membership is therefore strictly administrative and territorial. These memberships exist because they serve to monitor both a given territory and those persons connected to it. By registering the presence of those who habitually live in a municipality or who have essential interests within it, it is possible to obtain a “photograph” of the resident population, and this photograph goes from being static to dynamic as soon as the movements of individuals become “traceable” through the system of memberships. Indeed, the status of formal members in a local administration is lost and acquired in an elastic way each time a person abandons a given municipal territory and settles in a new municipality. Local memberships are therefore more flexible than state memberships, apart from their having a less political content than the latter: as they do not implicate common possession of traits and characteristics which—presumably—would connote a given state society, they can be attributed and revoked with greater ease. Indeed, in the Italian example, all foreigners with regular stay permits have the right to residency for the single reason that they stay in a given municipality, while the right to obtain citizenship depends on one’s having met certain much longer and more complex requirements, timelines and modalities. In specific historical phases and in specific spatial contexts, however, the forms of municipal membership assume a more political meaning, by tracing the borders of local society and limiting the boundaries of individual movement. The possibility of obtaining registration through a municipality can be subordinated—and has historically been subordinated—to specific more or less stringent requirements which establish differences and act as instruments limiting internal mobility and conditioning intra-statal migratory processes. Italy is exemplary in this respect. Under Fascism, the control of movements towards urban centres constituted one of the principal concerns of

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the regime. The policies against urbanism, promoted by Mussolini towards the end of limiting the increase of residents in the cities, translated in 1939 into the issuance of a law prohibiting persons who could not demonstrate their possession of a steady job from moving to municipalities with a population superior to 25,000 inhabitants (Treves, 1976). The climax of restrictive measures, however, came after the end of the Fascist regime when the scope of the legislation was extended to all Italian municipalities (Gallo, 2012, p. 159). The law against urbanism was abolished in 1961, some thirteen years after the entrance into force of the Constitution, whose Art. 16 stipulates that every citizen can freely circulate and stay in any part of the national territory. And yet, restrictions to municipal registration, aimed at impeding the movement of “undesirable” categories of persons into specific areas of the state, have since then constituted, albeit in a less explicit and more indirect form, an absolutely relevant phenomenon. The initiatives taken up in the most recent years by various municipalities, initiatives oriented towards illegitimately negating civil registration to foreigners and to “undesirable” citizens, impede the effective exercise of the rights conferred by the state norms and thus bring about important consequences for the freedom of movement and produce a weakening of status. The persistence of internal borders is an interesting fact, and one that should not be overlooked. Indeed, with the advance of the modern age, states seem to have progressively withdrawn from individuals and other private individuals the monopoly on legitimate freedom of movement, by regulating human movements through their frontiers (Torpey, 1998). In consequence, people have lost the ability to move freely from one state to another: although they continue to migrate de facto, in absence of an explicit authorisation they are no longer authorised to do this de jure. According to John Torpey, this implies a loss of relevancy in the local dimension and benefits the state dimension (ibid., p. 242). The controls exercised on individual movements, in other words, move from internal borders—those that delimit cities and citizens—to external frontiers. A control on borders of the first type would be maintained only by “non-­ democratic” states, like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, South-Africa during apartheid or communist China, at least up to 1980 (ibid., p. 243).

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This reading, however, does not take into account the strategic role played by the management of intrastate mobility in formally democratic contexts, such as Italy in the second post-war period. Focus on internal borders, however, is not necessarily a prerogative of “totalitarian” countries and—as we will see more clearly below—it is not merely an heirloom of the past. It rather represents an absolutely central aspect of the government of populations and territories as it has developed over time.

2.6 Policing and Knowing the Population The government of populations and territories has historically become progressively wider and detailed, intertwining with the changes in the conception and definition of police and police powers (Foucault, 2009). Originating from the Greek word politeia, in turn deriving from the term polis, the word “police” was widely used in early modernity to mean different things. More specifically, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it designated a form of community or association governed by a public authority, the set of actions that direct these communities under public authority or the positive and valued result of a good government (ibid., p. 313). From the seventeenth century on, the word “police” has taken on quite a different meaning, namely “the set of means by which the state’s forces can be increased while preserving the state in good order” (ibid., p. 313). During the first centuries of the modern age, the word “police” therefore had a broader meaning than in the following centuries, going beyond the simple contemporary idea of prevention of crime and law enforcement and rather embracing the task of defining and implementing the good order of society. The concept of good order has to be understood here in the widest possible sense, having to do with the happiness, prosperity and well-being of the population and not only with the containment of criminality within desired boundaries (Neocleous, 2000). Originally, the word police designated “an activity rather than an institution, a function rather than an entity” (ibid., p. 5). This twofold meaning of police is reflected in the verb and gerund forms of this term both in English and French: policing and policer (ibid., p. xi). The collapse of

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feudalism, a mode of production based on the unity of economic and political domination—that is, on serfdom as a simultaneous form of economic exploitation and socio-political coercion—and the resulting affirmation of a society in which growth of trade and industry were central paved the way for a new meaning for the word “police” (ibid., p. 1). The division and mobility of labour, as well as the increasing importance of a money economy that had weakened a social order based on estates, all required management and appropriate governance (ibid.). Previously diluted at the local level, political and legal power shifted at the national level in order to deal with the new needs of society. The rising states, in other words, started consolidating old activities and developing new ones. The social and political clashes occasioned by the birth of the autocratic institutions of the modern administrative monarchy were reflected in a theoretical dialectic between two concepts: iurisdictio and politia (Campesi, 2016, p. 8). The first notion, with which medieval theorists of public law summed up the idea of political dominion, came into conflict with the more openly voluntaristic conception of law and politics that modern political and legal thought would gradually crystallise in the second notion (ibid.). The dialectic between iurisdictio and politia, however, has not to be considered as a mere “succession from one political technology to the next, as if the medieval judicial state—centred on legal reason and the problem of the legitimacy and legality of political sovereignty— was first displaced by the administrative state of monarchical absolutism, based on the disciplines and programmes for regulating and directing socioeconomic life, and then by the Rechtsstaat, based on the modern reason of liberal government” (ibid., p.  5). In fact, the same legal and political technologies have served different purposes, but still have contributed to manage the problem of disciplining the socioeconomic social processes set in motion by the development of capitalism (ibid., p. 6). The police, more specifically, emerged as part of an overall concern with the increasing social disorders that were said to be plaguing the state because of the collapse of the feudal world: In its origins “police” thus presupposed a breakdown of the estate-based order which had previously given form to the social body. Where previously the estates had formed the foundation of order, so as they began to

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break down new means were necessary to re-form that order. The absolutist state stepped in to impose this order amidst a society of increasingly independent “individuals”, free (or at least relatively so) from their historic submission to the direct authority of the lord. (Neocleous, 2000, p. 3)

Once the old system of customary relations and authority was undermined, new means and practices were perceived as necessary to constitute a new political order—especially because the men set free from the traditional authority of feudalism were considered to be “masterless men”, as such disorderly (ibid.). Consequently, one of the main concerns of police was the discipline of those categories of people who were believed to constitute a risk for public order. But discipling as a vertical process actually extended to the entirety of society (Oestreich, 1982), with the purpose of producing subjects who were aware of their new roles and their place in a world still considered static and hierarchically shaped (Härter, 1994). More specifically, in its first stage—datable between the sixteenth and the first part of seventeenth centuries—policing was constituted by ad hoc reactive measures, aimed at maintaining “the structure of manners threatened by the decay of the existing Estates and the crisis provoked by the Reformation” (Neocleous, 2000, p. 5). The main concern of police was negative: it reacted to emerging social problems and crises by means of an “emergency legislation”, passed without breaking with legal tradition (Raeff, 1983). The main tool of policing were police ordinances, which concerned a huge set of issues (Härter, 1994; Kotkas, 2014). From the seventeenth century onward, the police began to take on a profoundly different meaning, referring “to the set of means by which the state’s forces can be increased while preserving the state in good order” (Foucault, 2009, p. 313). It came to denote “the calculation and technique that will make it possible to establish a mobile, yet stable and controllable relationship between the state’s internal order and the development of its forces” (ibid.). More specifically, in its second stage— datable between the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) and the late eighteenth century—police legislation and ordinances acquired a positive cast, no longer aimed at restoring and correcting abuses and defects but rather oriented towards the creation of new conditions for social change and innovations (Neocleous, 2000, p. 6).

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The police, in other words, represented a way to constitute reality as an object of a particular governmental rationality (Napoli, 2003). Hence, it was less concerned with reforming the old and obsolete social body made of estates, that with actively shaping a new social body, which would suitable for the production of wealth (Neocleous, 2000, p. 6). The order was no longer conceived as natural and divine, and as such constant and immutable, but was increasingly seen as being politically structured around the concept of sovereign power (ibid., p. 7). At this stage, characterised by the political affirmation of absolutism, the interests of capitalist actors played a strategic role within a more general conception of state and its ruling purposes. The Polizeistaat, developing itself in several European countries, was dedicated to the protection of the population, the welfare of the state and its citizens and the improvement of society in all its aspects (ibid., p. 9). Part of this idea of protection, which, especially in German-speaking areas, took the form of cameralism (Cameralwissenschaft) and meant the rise of a science of the police (Polizeiwissenschaft) (Raeff, 1983), was the management of poverty. The labouring poor, as well as potential beggars and vagrants, were categories subject to police power, being considered as they were a threat to social order. Basically, policing meant administering the class of poverty, adopting specific strategies to fulfil this scope (Neocleous, p.  16). This also implies rationally disciplining the social body through the homogenisation of social behaviour, and the construction of a prototypical individual to whom all would be expected to conform (Federici, 2004, pp. 145–146). The stakes involved building up an “abstract individual” in Marx’s terms, namely, a human being “constructed in a uniform way, as a social average, and subject to a radical decharacterisation, so that all of its faculties can be grasped only in their most standardized aspects” (ibid., p.  146). This strategy was called by William Petty political arithmetics and was based on the idea of studying every form of social behaviour in terms of numbers, weights, and measures (ibid.). Petty’s project was realised with the development of statistics and demography, sciences aiming at knowing the population in order to shape it in a desired manner (Wilson, 1965). In this period, police, on the one hand, aimed to immobilise those elements of society considered disorderly so as to make them harmless,

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while on the other hand was committed to mobilise the same elements in order to turn them into a mobile and active workforce (Neocleous, 2000, p.  17). Since the prosperity of the state depended on the productive power of the labour force, the main concern of the institutions was that “the producers of wealth were the same group who could potentially become a burden on the relief system” (ibid.). Therefore, if in the first stage of police the measures against vagrants and beggars were mostly punitive, in the second stage the policing of the poor took the form of a series of strategies to impose work (ibid., 19). In its third stage—starting from the last decades of eighteenth century—the police was directed towards the construction of a new form of order. This was a bourgeois order, yet still not completely formed, based on the idea that the former masterless men had to be turned into rational calculating individuals, truly devoted to pursuing defined economic goals. This means that the prosperity of the state had to be declined in terms of productivity of labour and a more effective wealth production. Mobilising work was expected to produce as a result the mobilisation of work, so as to shape a new and modern working class (ibid., p. 20). With the rise of liberalism, policing had to be consistent with the rule of law and a liberal polity. This process has implied that capital replaced police in mastering and disciplining labourers and dangerous classes. While the former was committed to shaping the workforce according to the rules of factory and production, the latter acquired a more restricted meaning, concerning individuals’ legal protection and the maintenance of public order (Kotkas, 2014, p. 10). The police was thus conceived “as a body of officials charged with preventing and detecting crime—a body charged with enforcing the law while simultaneously limited by it” (Neocleous, 2000, p. 42). But it has remained tightly linked to the transformation of lazy, ignorant and potentially rebellious people into docile workers. Indeed, the refusal to be disciplined by the power of capital by refusing to obey the order of the master was understood to be a criminal offence (ibid., p. 41). Moreover, policing, in the restricting of its meaning, has marked the birth of administrative law: the notion of “police” was basically replaced with the term “administration” (Kotkas, 2014, p. 10). This process created the conditions for the development of a new activity: social police,

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which is the first form of the contemporary social policy.8 The institutions committed to giving assistance to poor people, on the one hand, and the police as a crime prevention agency, on the other, have hence become the two sides of the same political economy aiming at managing part of the population and dealing with the broader issue of pauperism (Procacci, 1991). In more detail, the “pauper-claimants” were “left to the control mechanisms of the institutions of social police (the poor law). In this sense social police is in some sense a form of border patrol—the policing of the borders of citizenship; the borders, that is, of the categories defining those who are to come under the greater control, surveillance and administration by the state” (Neocleous, 2000, p. 82). As liberalism becomes the hegemonic ideology of an ever more completely formed bourgeois society, security affirms itself as the supreme concept of this kind of social order (Neocleous, 2008, p. 31). From such a perspective, liberalism appears less as a philosophy of liberty and more as a technique of security, namely, a strategy of governance in which security is deployed as liberty (Dean, 1991, p.  196). Moreover, the two dimensions of security that have emerged during the modern age—social security and civil security (Castel, 2003)—appear to be already quite intertwined as the protection of the “good” part of the population is conceived as strictly dependant on assistance and control exercised towards the dangerous classes. By affirming itself as a new political rationality, liberalism has criticised and renewed the modern art of governing: as shown by Foucault, liberal government is a complex politico-economic discourse contrasting the sciences of the state under the ancien regime (Dean, 1999, p. 50). Under liberalism, the idea of totally disciplining the life process is not abandoned, but it is rather reconverted and reimagined (Campesi, 2016, pp.  4–5). Foucault calls biopolitics the set of techniques that attempts, “starting from the eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems posed to governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population: health, hygiene, birthrate, life expectancy, race …” (Foucault, 2008, p. 317). These techniques are quite different from the past:

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Unlike discipline, which is addressed to bodies, the new nondisciplinary power is applied not to man-as-body but to the living man, to man-as-­ living-­being; ultimately, if you like, to man-as-species. To be more specific, I would say that discipline tries to rule a multiplicity of men to the extent that their multiplicity can and must be dissolved into individual bodies that can be kept under surveillance, trained, used, and, if need be, punished. And that the new technology that is being established is addressed to a multiplicity of men, not to the extent that they are nothing more than their individual bodies, but to the extent that they form, on the contrary, a global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness, and so on. (Foucault, 2003, pp. 242–243)

Within such a kind of political rationality, the management of the population has even more become the question of how to know its characteristics and shape its form and movements. Consequently, administrative tools—such as censuses, population registers and identification documents—have acquired a growing importance (Anderson, 1991; Curtis, 2001; Rose, 1996). Especially when, during the twenties of the twentieth century, the concept of population, due to the collaboration between statisticians and eugenicists, has assumed biological connotations, not only in the Italian fascist regime (Padovan, 2003) but also in “democratic” countries (Le Bras, 1998). Hence, while in the first and second stages of policing, people are explicitly repressed and disciplined, in its third stage, population is somehow recognised as free to move and act autonomously. However, this does not mean that the control exercised over it ceases to be effective. Rather it changes, paving the way for new strategies and devices for shaping, monitoring and controlling people’s movements and behaviours. To this end, censuses, public registers of population and documents of identification play a central role, allowing institutions to “follow” the individuals in their movements, both within national territory and outside it, as well as to shape their movement choices and lifestyles, and also to get more knowledge about the characteristics of the single individuals and families living in the different areas of the country. Registration and identification become part of a wider political economy of the different elements of society.

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Notes 1. On the history of this specific tool, a very interesting contribution is given by Razac (2009). 2. The only exception are stateless persons. 3. Stateless persons—devoid of citizenship, and thus not identifiable as members of a political community—are an exception to this reasoning, as well as persons with double, or multiple, state memberships—that is, those who can be traced back to more than a single political entity. 4. The term “embrace” which Torpey employs derives from the German word erfassen, which means “to grasp” in the sense of record, and it is employed both with reference to the registers deliberately established for foreigners, towards the end of monitoring, administration and regulation, and with reference to censuses (Torpey, 2019, p. 14). According to the American scholar, the notion which he proposes shares certain elements with the concept of “caging” proposed by Michael Mann, but it differs from the latter insofar as it is focused on how the states “embrace” individuals and groups in order to carry out their objectives, and recalls the idea of James Scott according to which the institutions seek to render society more “legible” and open to being governed (ibid.). 5. On the relevance of documents in governing individuals’, and especially migrants’, mobility see Cabot (2012). 6. In some countries, documents of identification are issued by the municipal authorities, even to “illegitimate” persons on the state territory. On this point, see De Graauw (2014) and Varsany (Varsanyi, 2010). 7. There also exist other documents that are not constituted as instruments of recognition in the strict sense but which nonetheless carry out relevant functions in the relations between persons and the public administration, or in private transaction of the economic or civil kind: among these, the codice fiscale in Italy, the National Insurance Number in the United Kingdom and the Nie in Spagna. 8. Also the word policy, as that of police, derive from the Greek term politeia (Kotkas, 2014, pp. 2–3).

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Chauvin, S., & Garcés-Mascareñas, B. (2012). Beyond Informal Citizenship: The New Moral Economy of Migrant Illegality. International Political Sociology, 6(3), 241–259. Chauvin, S., & Garcés-Mascareñas, B. (2014). Becoming Less Illegal: Deservingness Frames and Undocumented Migrant Incorporation. Sociology Compass, 8(4), 422–432. Costa, P. (2005). Cittadinanza. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Curtis, B. (2001). Politics of Population: Statistics, State Formation, and the Census of Canada, 1840–1875. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Cuttitta, P. (2015). Territorial and Non-territorial: The Mobile Borders of Migration Controls. In A. L. Amilhat Szary & F. Giraut (Eds.), Borderities and the Politics of Contemporary Mobile Borders (pp. 241–255). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. De Genova, N. (2005). Working the Boundaries Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago. Durham: Duke University Press. De Graauw, E. (2014). Municipal Id Cards for Undocumented Immigrants: Local Bureaucratic Membership in a Federal System. Politics and Society, 42(3), 309–330. Dean, M. (1991). The Constitution of Poverty: Toward a Theory of Liberal Governance. London: Routledge. Dean, M. (1999). Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage. Derlugian, G. M. (1996). The Social Cohesion of the States. In T. Hopkins & I.  Wallerstein (Eds.), The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World System, 1945–2025 (pp. 148–177). London: Zed Books. Dinelli, F. (2011). Le appartenenze territoriali. Contributo allo studio della cittadinanza, della residenza e della cittadinanza europea. Napoli: Jovene. Edensor, T. (2017). From Light to Dark. Daylight, Illumination, and Gloom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Elden, S. (2013). The Birth of Territory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn: Autonomedia. Foucault, M. (2003). Society Must be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. New York: Picador. Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (2009). Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978. New York: Picador.

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Gallo, S. (2012). Senza attraversare le frontiere. Le migrazioni interne dall’Unità a oggi. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Gonzales, R. G., & Sigona, N. (2017). Within and Beyond Citizenship: Borders, Membership and Belonging. London: Routledge. Goody, J. (1986). The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greblo, E. (2018). Ai confini della democrazia. Sovranità democratica e diritti umani. Grosso, E. (1997). Le vie della cittadinanza. le grandi radici. I modelli storici di riferimento. Padova: CEDAM. Härter, K. (1994). Disciplinamento sociale e ordinanze di polizia nella prima età moderna. In P. Prodi (Ed.), Disciplina dell’anima, disciplina del corpo e disciplina della società tra medioevo ed età moderna. Bologna: Il Mulino. Harvey, D. (2001). Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Heath Wellman, C., & Cole, P. (2011). Debating the Ethics of Immigration: Is There a Right to Exclude? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heyman, J.  M. C., & Symons, J. (2012). Borders. In D.  Fassin (Ed.), A Companion to Moral Anthropology (pp. 540–557). Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Hindess, B. (2000). Citizenship in the International Management of Populations. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(9), 1486–1497. Horton, S. B., & Heyman, J. (Eds.). (2020). Paper trails. Migrants, Documents, and Legal Insecurity. Durham: Duke University Press. Isenstadt, S., Maile Petty, M., & Neumann, D. (2015). Cities of Light: Two Centuries of Urban Illumination. London: Routledge. Isin, E. F., & Turner, B. S. (2002). Handbook of Citizenship Studies. London: Sage. Kennedy, P. (1993). Preparing for the Twenty-First Century. New  York: Random House. Kotkas, T. (2014). Royal Police Ordinances in Early Modern Sweden. The Emergence of Voluntaristic Understanding of Law. Leiden: Brill. Le Bras, H. (1998). Le démon des origines. La Tour d’Aigues: Éditions de l’aube. Lockwood, D. (1996). Civic Integration and Class Formation. British Journal of Sociology, 47(3), 531–550. Mezzadra, S. (2001). Diritto di fuga. Migrazioni, cittadinanza, globalizzazione. Verona: Ombre corte. Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, B. (2013). Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham: Duke University Press. Mindus, P. (2014). Cittadini e no. Forme e funzioni dell’inclusione e dell’esclusione. Firenze: Firenze University Press.

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Morris, L. (2002). Managing Migration: Civic Stratification and Migrants’ Rights. London: Routledge. Morris, L. (2003). Managing Contradiction: Civic Stratification and Migrants’ Rights. International Migration Review, 37(1), 74–100. Napoli, P. (2003). Naissance de la police moderne. Pouvoir, normes, société. Paris: La Découverte. Neocleous, M. (2000). The Fabrication of Social Order. A Critical Theory of Police Power. London: Pluto Press. Neocleous, M. (2003). Imagining the state. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Neocleous, M. (2008). Critique of Security. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Noiriel, G. (1991). La Tyrannie du national. Le droit d’asile en Europe (1793–1993). Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Noiriel, G. (1996 [1988]). The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Noiriel, G. (1998). Surveiller les déplacements ou identifier les personnes? Contributions à l’historie du passeport en France de la Ier a la IIIe république, «Genèses: Sciences sociales et histoire», 30, pp. 77–100. Oestreich, G. (1982). Neostoicism and the Early Modern State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paasi, A. (1998). Boundaries as Social Processes: Territoriality in the World of Flows. Geopolitics, 3(1), 69–88. Padovan, D. (2003). Biopolitics and the Social Control of the Multitude. Democracy & Nature, 9(3), 473–494. Procacci, G. (1991). Social Economy and the Government of Poverty. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (pp. 151–168). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Raeff, M. (1983). The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change Through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800. New Haven: Yale University Press. Razac, O. (2009). Histoire politique du barbelé. Paris: Flammarion. Rigo, E. (2005). Citizenship at Europe’s Borders: Some Reflections on the Post-­ colonial Condition of Europe in the Context of EU Enlargement. Citizenship Studies, 9(1), 3–22. Rose, N. (1996). Governing “Advanced” Liberal Democracies. In A.  Barry, T. Osborne, & N. Rose (Eds.), Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-­ liberalism and Rationalities of Government (pp.  37–64). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Rumford, C. (2006). Theorizing Borders. European Journal of Social Theory, 9(2), 155–169.

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Salter, M.  B. (2008). When the Exception Becomes the Rule: Borders, Sovereignty, and Citizenship. Citizenship Studies, 12(4), 365–380. Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Tazzioli, M. (2019). The Making of Migration. The Biopolitics of Mobility at Europe’s Borders. London: Sage. Tilly, C. (1975). The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tintori, G. (2015). Italian Mobilities and the Demos, in a Cura. In R.  Ben Ghiat & S.  Malia Hom (Eds.), Italian Mobilities (pp.  111–132). London: Routledge. Torpey, J. (1998). Coming and Going: On the State Monopolization of the Legitimate “Means of Movement”. Sociological Theory, 16(3), 239–259. Torpey, J. (2019). The Invention of the Passaport. Surveillance, Citizenship and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Treves, A. (1976). Le migrazioni interne nell’Italia fascista. Politica e realtà demografica. Torino: Einaudi. Turner, B., & Hamilton, P. (Eds.). (1994). Citizenship Critical Concepts. London: Routledge. United Nations. (2014). A World that Counts. (https://www.undatarevolution. org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/A-World-That-Counts.pdf ) Van Houtum, H., & Van Naerssen, T. (2001). Bordering, Ordering and Othering. Tijdschrift voor Economiche en Sociale Geografie, 93(2), 125–136. Varsanyi, M.  W. (Ed.). (2010). Taking Local Control: Immigration and Policy Activism in U.S. Cities and States. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wallerstein, I. (1974). The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press. Walters, W. (2002). Mapping Schengenland: Denaturalizing the Border. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 20(5), 561–580. Williams, J. (2006). The Ethics of Territorial Borders. Drawing Lines in the Shifting Sand. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wilson, C. (1965). Political Arithmetic and Social Change. In C. Wilson (Ed.), England’s Apprenticeship 1603–1763. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Yuval-Davis, N., Wemyss, G., & Cassidy, K. (2019). Bordering. Cambridge: Polity Press. Zolo, D. (Ed.). (1994). La cittadinanza. Appartenenza, identità, diritti. Roma-­ Bari: Laterza.

3 The Borders of Local Citizenship

3.1 A Multilevel System of Statuses The system of the status borders that has formed over the course of the modern age takes on a complex and articulated structure. State citizenship has affirmed its primary status, gradually undermining the forms of local medieval and pre-modern membership. This form of territorial membership has maintained its relevance intact for the entire twentieth century, even when new post- or trans-national modalities of membership have seemed to undermine its exclusivity. More specifically, in the last decades of the twentieth century, European citizenship appeared on the scene. Initially, it presented itself as a potential alternative to national citizenship. Soon, however, this membership revealed itself to be simply an addition and not a replacement to full state membership (Dell’Olio, 2005). Moreover, it is continually exposed to criticism and endangerment by the disruptive tendencies of the European Union (Mindus, 2017). At the same time, the forms of partial recognition, reserved to non-EU citizens, have sustained powerful limitations and conditioning. Using security and integration as practical and discursive devices, strong restrictions to entrance and stay have obstructed the © The Author(s) 2021 E. Gargiulo, Invisible Borders, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53836-1_3

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continued presence of these categories of persons (Huysmans, 2006). The issuance and/or renewal of authorisations are systematically denied to them, or at least are subordinated to the satisfaction of ever more stringent requirements. In general, the position of non-citizens—as well as of long-term residents, the so-called denizens—has been strongly weakened. This process of disintegration is favoured by dynamics at the local level, interweaving with the trajectory of municipal memberships. Residency takes on a growing centrality, not only as a municipal form of membership but also as a tool of “implementation” of state and supranational memberships. The status of resident, constituting as it does the predominant route of access to rights, represents in many states the conditio sine qua non for the full realisation of legal recognition. Its denial consequently puts a powerful brake on the effective exercise of those prerogatives that correspond to different formal statuses. The system of status borders is presently articulated in a multilevel manner. The European space presents a very interesting context from this point of view: with the constitution of the European Union, and the institution of its relative citizenship, a formal membership was introduced at the supranational level. In consequence, the member states also provide their citizens this kind of membership. Their legal ordinances provide for a plurality of statuses, which express alternative modalities of state membership. The structure of legal recognition consequently takes on a pyramidal form (Pastore, 2014), containing, above all in its lower parts, a wide range of legal positions. This plurality, for simplicity, can be traced back to the dichotomy that opposes citizens to non-citizens. The latter, in contrast to the former, are required to meet certain conditions whenever the enter or stay in a country different to that to which they formally belong—or in any country at all, if they are stateless persons. Non-citizens, however, are not equal to one another: not all of them satisfy these conditions. The category that contains them is thus articulated into a new dichotomy, which opposes the “authorised” to the “non-­ authorised”. The conditions required to grant this authorisation are at the same time widely diversified and vary on the basis of the origin and the motivations of the non-citizens in question.

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We thus find ourselves standing before yet another dichotomy, which subdivides non-citizens into two groups: on the one hand are European citizens—which is to say, the members of states belonging to European Union—and on the other foreigners—which is to say, the members of countries external to this macro-regional aggregate—and stateless persons: the first can freely enter a EU state but must satisfy particular requirements if they wish to prolong their stay beyond three months,1 while the second are required to possess specific documents to enter, and then to reside, in a country different to their country of origin. Even if European citizens are subject to less rigid constraints as compared to foreigners, they still can under certain conditions find themselves in a situation of “irregularity”,2 and thus risk expulsion from the host territory. The differentiation between statuses does not stop at the dichotomy between Europeans and non-Europeans. Indeed, both for the first group and for the second group, some persons are authorised to stay indefinitely, while others are subject to periodical verification procedures. In the case of EU citizens, the possibility of acquiring the right to permanent stay is conferred on those who have legally and continuously stayed in the Italian territory for five years. In the case of foreigners or stateless persons, on the other hand, the right to stay indefinitely is reserved— with some exceptions—to those who have held a stay permit for at least five years and can satisfactorily demonstrate that they meet certain requirements.3 Despite the fact that the period of time which is required here is not the same for Europeans and non-Europeans, the latter, since they face larger obstacles to obtain an authorisation to legally reside in a country, and in consequence to accumulate the five years required, find themselves in an inferior and more unstable position as compared to the former. Other legally present non-citizens—that is, those who have been in Italy regularly for at least five years, or who have stayed there for a longer amount of time but not always regularly—are obliged, as we have seen, to subject themselves to various sets of conditions, thus giving rise to categories that differ from one another and from that constituted by persons authorised “for long stays”. European citizens, for example, must present different requirements for their stay according to the category to which they belong,4 and are thus divided into different statuses. Likewise,

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foreigners with limited stay times can fall into a great many conditions; the holders of subsidiary protection and the holders of annual renewable stay permits granted for work reasons, for family reasons or for study, for example, have a stronger bond with the Italian state than those who possess authorisation for seasonal work. A diversified set of rights corresponds to the different statuses that compose this system of memberships. The broadest set is normally conferred on citizens. Less broad, but nonetheless important, catalogues of rights are attributed to the members of European countries (who enjoy certain political rights and many social rights), to foreigners in possession of long-term stay permits (who hold many social rights, though not political rights) and to those granted refugee status (whose rights are similar to those of foreigners with long-term stay permits). A set of still less broad rights is attributed to those foreigners who hold various kinds of stay permits of limited term (these enjoy many social rights), and, finally, irregular foreigners, to whom are recognised certain social rights, but not in the same way as regular foreigners: for example, at the level of healthcare, the former are guaranteed only access to emergency assistance (even continuous) and to the measures of preventive medicine. These statuses and their corresponding rights, therefore, are not simply differentiated, they are actually stratified (Joppke, 2010). In other words, a vertically organised hierarchy forms between the various legal positions, to which there corresponds a stratification of rights. Irregular persons benefit from fewer rights than do regular persons; among the latter, those who hold a permanent stay permit stand in a position of advantage as compared to those who are granted provisional authorisations, and so forth. In some countries, the system of stratification assumes an even greater complexity. Wherever forms of recognition to a local level are present, these contribute to articulating the hierarchy of the statuses in still greater detail. Municipal memberships can be attributed to all the persons present in the municipal territory, including “irregular” non-citizens, or they can be restricted only to those who are “legally” present. Spain is an example of the first case, while Italy is an example of the second. When civil registration is extended to all, local membership constitutes a levelling instrument—obviously a limited and partial one—so far

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as difference of status are concerned, by providing the same kind of municipal recognition to subjects of different formal statuses at the state level. If, on the other hand, it is limited to specific categories, the equalising effect loses relevance, though it remains important for the groups involved. In the Italian context, for example, “irregular” non-citizens are kept outside the legal sphere of municipal residents, and so they do not benefit from of any equalisation, while “regular” non-citizens have the right to civil registration, and therefore, at least on paper, acquire a status equal to that enjoyed by citizens.

3.2 Statuses That Include, but Differentially The system of status borders is characterised by a high degree of civic stratification, maintained by both formal and informal mechanisms. Civic exclusion and civic gain both play a central role in favouring the presence of diversified statuses. The hierarchy of civic stratification, moreover, is structured and complicated not only by the laws on immigration and the rules of access to citizenship but also by measures of integration and local initiatives aimed at restricting the assigning of residency. The first threaten a person’s presence in the territory and produce a distinction between “integrated” and “non-integrated” foreigners. The second can provoke effects in terms of domestic migration and can “double” every status of state membership, introducing the legal distinction between residents in the formal sense and those who, despite having the right to it, are deprived of local recognition. The system of status borders is therefore characterised in a structural way by forms of legal exclusion that tend to be accompanied by dynamics of economic and social marginalisation; these, however, are not necessarily followed by processes of spatial expulsion. Often, in fact, persons denied status live, work and cultivate relations, though in a position of disadvantage, in the same territories in which they are not formally recognised. The word “exclusion” therefore risks misleading that person who wishes to understand the effects of the process of civic stratification, save as this word is qualified in a juridical sense. In fact, one can be excluded

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from a certain formal status even while remaining included within the social fabric and the economic activities that characterise it—clearly, in a subordinated position, and one more prone to extortion. This asymmetry however threatens to vanish from sight if one adopts terms that evoke radical removal from the tissue of the community without specifying how a certain kind of material presence, and thus of inclusion, can at the same time be “excluding”. In other words, the generic use of the word “exclusion” can convey a dichotomous reasoning, which is apparently sensible but in reality misleading: namely that one is excluded only when one is physically cut out of society or is radically marginalised in a spatial sense; otherwise, in case of those who are included in a context of social and economic relations, one is de facto included. Moreover, to speak generally of “excluded” subjects evokes images of people physically withheld from society, or, alternatively, reduced to a condition of absolute marginalisation, which might coincide with ghettoisation or a person’s reduction to extreme lifestyles (as, e.g., begging for money or living in the street). However, many persons who are legally excluded live side by side with the included, perhaps in less valued areas of urban centres, and adopt behaviours and lifestyles which are not necessarily reducible to a state of outright marginalisation, with (often “legal”) gainful employment. In this sense, they are included in both a physical and socioeconomical sense. Their inclusion, however, is asymmetrical, de jure and de facto: the possession of a low-level legal status, or even the absence of any formal recognition whatsoever, makes them vulnerable and opens them to extortion, exposing them to greater risks as compared to the rest of the population. The locution “social exclusion” thus tends to hide the vertical dimension of inequalities and the power asymmetries that characterise the relations between individuals and groups. As Didier Fassin has observed, this expression indicates the deprivation of a “social bond”: an experience which might involve the whole of society rather than certain specific components thereof (Fassin, 2010). To use it in a generic way means consequently to impede the perception of how phenomena like unemployment and precarious employment, as well as the diffusion of certain kinds of illness or the risk of incurring injury, are more closely connected

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to membership in specific socio-professional categories and in the residential classification than to simply being members of a given population. Also, the category of expulsion, employed by Saskia Sassen (Sassen, 2014) to describe the effects of neoliberal economic transformations on small and medium-sized businesses, on workers and on farmers, might be useful for bringing to light certain aspects of the paths of civic stratification, supposing only that it is contextualised and re-articulated. The descent along the scale of formal statuses constitutes a phenomenon similar to being “pressed outside the borders of the system”, the phenomenon discussed by the American scholar: in this case, those persons who are drawn step by step downward are the same who, up to a certain moment, occupy a given legal position, and then subsequently slide lower on the scale, without receiving any justification or acceptable and comprehensible explanations for their descent. Legal expulsion, however, even though it has a strong impact on the life of individuals, is not necessarily followed by physical removal. Indeed, so long as the mechanisms of economic accumulation are functioning, the extraction of value from subjects in marginal conditions presupposes their material but subaltern presence. The legal dimension, therefore, might not be congruent with the spatial: to consider them equivalent creates confusion and obscures important aspects of the paths to marginalisation. More specifically, legal exclusion does not necessarily have the consequence, neither de facto nor de jure, of material expulsion from a territory. The most appropriate category to describe and analyse the processes of legal marginalisation and their effects in a multidimensional way is perhaps that of differential inclusion (De Genova, 2010, 2013; Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013), which expresses and summarises the (very widespread) condition of those persons who live in a territory without enjoying an adequate legal status: in their case, the absence of legal recognition is accompanied by a state of subordination and dependency on the level of employment—which is to say the absence of an authentic economic and existential autonomy. These persons, on account of the weakening of their status and the consequent negation of their rights, are therefore partially included, and are thus doomed to forms of discrimination,

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exploitation and segmentation in the job market, occupying positions of high vulnerability within their “host” society. In migratory studies, the notion of differential inclusion normally indicates the condition of individuals who live “illegally” in a territory, and who find themselves, therefore, in a state of overall marginalisation. Hereafter, however, we will use this term also in reference to those who, though authorised to stay, cannot concretely exercise the rights they possess because they are deprived of local membership, which is to say, of residency. These include non-citizens who are regularly present on a given territory but also citizens who, on account of this deprivation, suffer the symbolic and material consequences.

3.3 T  he Political Economy of Differential Inclusion Differential inclusion, characterised by legal exclusions and expulsions and, at the same time, by spatial presence and by a subordinate position within the job market, is useful to the processes of accumulation which characterise the global politico-economic context. Inclusion of this kind has very clear historical causes. The emergence and the development of status borders are linked to the needs of capitalism, a phenomenon that unfolds within an arena which is neither controlled nor controllable by a single state agency and which produces expansion of wealth at the cost of the extremely unequal redistribution of the same (Wallerstein, 1974). More specifically, capitalism as a historical system, which is to say, as “that concrete, time-bounded space-bounded integrated locus of productive activities within which the endless accumulation of capital has been the economic objective or ‘law’ that has governed or prevailed in fundamental economic activity”, (Wallerstein, 1996, p. 18) is structurally distinguished by the systematic exclusion of a large part of the global population from the benefits of the creation of value. Capitalism, therefore, “is that social system in which those who have operated by such rules have had such great impact on the whole as to create conditions wherein the other

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have been forced to conform to the patterns or to suffer the consequences” (ibidem). The processes of asymmetrical accumulation, and the disparities in the recognition of memberships which intrinsically characterise the capitalist system, see political institutions—states, above all, but also macro-­ regional aggregates and local governments—as central actors in the expropriation of resources and the expulsion of persons and groups from statuses and rights. Capitalism, therefore, in contrast to the description of it which is often made, is not characterised exclusively by a specific modality of production of goods and by the action of market forces but also—and perhaps above all—by the type of political institutions which operate within it and are directly responsible for the creation of the legal “rules of the game”, and of initiatives that favour economic accumulation and render legal memberships unstable. Braudel, analysing the capitalistic system, subdivides human economic activity into three planes: the third, that of capitalism in the narrow sense, moves “beside, or rather above”; the second, the market; and the first, material life. This third plane is “the zone of the anti-market”, “where the great predators roam and the law of the jungle operates” (Braudel, 1983, p. 230). The plane of which the French historian speaks had, and has, a complex configuration, which articulates itself at the supranational, state and local levels. The state, historically, has assumed a central importance in the modern epoch, and subsequently in the contemporary epoch, but it is not the only relevant political actor. Braudel, towards the end of describing the global politico-economic structure of capitalism, introduces the notion of the world-economy, defining it as “the economy of only one portion of our planet, to the degree that it forms an economic whole” (Braudel, 1977, p.  81). Wallerstein, taking up this category, distinguishes world-empires, which existed in previous historical phases, from the world-economies: the first are constituted by a single political entity which extends itself over the vast majority of the world’s surface, maintaining rather limited control, while the second are distinguished by the presence of a plurality of actors (Wallerstein, 1974, p. 348). From this point of view, capitalism is constituted by an economy-world which has survived for 500 years without transforming itself into empire-world, and has succeeded in thriving

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because it “has had within its bounds not one but a multiplicity of political systems” (ibid.). The quest for accumulation has therefore guided economic actors in the accomplishment of their objectives, and political institutions in the construction of a context adequate to these ends. Clearly, this is neither a deterministic nor a totalising process: the various actors do not necessarily and in an explicit, intentional, ironclad manner follow the rules of capitalism. However, the way in which this historical formation continually reproduces itself renders the actions undertaken by its various actors useful to its overall goals; or, at least, it adapts them to the system and to its necessities. It is therefore within the logic of capitalism, or rather in the intersections between the various politico-institutional levels and in their relations with the markets, that the game of status borders is played out. The states play a central role in this game by structurally regulating the paths of partial, subordinate and selective inclusion. In the process of constituting themselves, they progressively absorb and centralise similar functions undertaken by other actors. There yet remains, however, a large and open space for alternative actors. The local authorities and, in recent decades, supranational actors, furnish an important contribution to the regulation of human mobility and the recognition of status. The processes of differential inclusion are justified and legitimised through discourses and a rhetoric of noticeably exclusionary character, and they are translated into policy by the legal and administrative apparatuses of state, supranational and local actors. Overall, these actors institute distinctions between “deserving” and “undeserving” subjects, true “members” and “spurious” individuals. In the sphere of historical capitalism, the processes of categorisation and differentiation have proven useful to the maintenance of the privileges acquired by specific social groups. The attempts to cement the advantages they have acquired are counterpoised by struggles aimed at obtaining yet unrecognised status and rights. The tension that derives from the incompatibility between these various claims produces a permanent conflict between the various groups, which all strive for hegemony.5 The characteristics of this conflict change in response to the drafting of social compacts modifying the balance of power. At those phases when a certain hegemony is consolidated, new

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“historical compromises” are established, capable of lowering the level of conflict. In this way, the political and economic elites guarantee the ideal conditions for new processes of accumulation (Arrighi & Silver, 1999). On the other hand, in the phase of hegemonic transition, the social foundations of the dominant bloc tend to enlarge, while the de jure or de facto exclusion of the majority of the global population from access to resources and rights, as well as social conflict, tend to worsen (Silver & Slater, 1999). It is not a simple matter to establish whether the present historical period globally constitutes a phase of hegemonic transition. Without doubt, the last decades of the twentieth century and the first twenty years of the 2000s have been characterised by the diffusion of a politico-­ economic vision and by a set of governing techniques which can be summed up in the word neoliberalism. This project of reorganisation of international capitalism, aimed at re-establishing the conditions necessary for an asymmetrical wealth accumulation favourable to the economic elite, has favoured the entrance of private actors into decision-making fora, the use of para-legal instruments in the regulation of various phenomena—including immigration, the informalisation and the precarisation of work—and the technical management of political questions (Dardot & Laval, 2013). In the neoliberal scenario, the regime of status has seen important changes. Among these, the already cited multiplication of status borders, which is manifested not only through the production of material and legal barriers established to hinder access to territories but also through the introduction of legal and administrative impediments to the acquisition of statuses or the maintenance of the same. The diversification of those formal positions that connect individuals to institutions, which was already important in the past, has today become a strategic instrument of governance. The proliferation of legal and administrative boundaries, and thus of status borders, is a phenomenon of central importance, not only from the quantitative point of view but also from the qualitative: beyond increasing in number and in kind, the statuses that have been constituted are highly unstable. The mechanisms of civic stratification, more specifically, provoke a precarisation of memberhsip, which renders the forms of recognition highly uncertain and produces evident consequences in people’s

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lives. These effects are altogether internal to the broader neoliberal transformations: to govern by constructing precariousness means not only creating uncertainties in employment and its flexibilisation but also destabilising entire ways of life and deconstructing individuals (Lorey, 2015).

3.4 A Regime of Statuses The asymmetrical remuneration of persons and of groups involved in the system of production and exchange, just as the failure to compensate those who are excluded from this system or included in it altogether partially, is favoured by the presence of a hierarchy of status. This is a differential system of formal statuses to which important rights are connected—above all liberty of movement but also the possibility of exercising the right to vote and to have access to benefits and social aid. This system plays a central role in rendering economic differences fluid, and, above all, in legitimising them. It is, in other words, a status regime, in which various actors participate—actors granted various formal and substantial competences, and holding various interests and objectives which are not necessarily consistent and convergent with one another. The word “regime”, however, does not imply central and vertical planning, but rather the existence of a sum total of more or less structured and formalised rules, issued by partially independent sources, that condition individual actions, limiting their mobility and guaranteeing them selective recognition (Cvajner, Hecheverria, & Sciortino, 2018; Horvath, Amelina, & Peters, 2017). On the global level, the expansion of citizenship to ever more persons and of the catalogue of their rights—an expansion which characterises the central areas of the world—is closely connected to the decline in living conditions, which can be observed in the peripheral and semi-­ peripheral zones of the same global system, just as it is connected to the failure to recognise specific categories of persons even in the most “advanced” countries. Indeed, the effective inclusion of all persons, by causing an insufficient distribution of surplus value, would have rendered the defence of the incessant accumulation of capital impossible; at the

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same time, the inclusion of no one, the actual maintenance of a kind of ancien régime, would have produced the same effect by pressing the conflict to levels which would have destabilised the system (Wallerstein, 2002). Citizenship historically thus represents a compromise which has served to placate the most “dangerous” social groups, preventing their protests from erupting in an unmanageable and destabilising conflict; but, at the same time, it has excluded them from the division of surplus value and from decision-making processes, preserving in this way the basis of accumulation. The matter of supranational memberships evinces very similar dynamics. In the European context, the introduction of the status of citizen of the European Union represents without doubt an expansion of life possibilities for its holders, just as for those foreigners who succeed in regularly entering into the EU territory, and who enjoy in consequence a liberty of movement superior to that of the past; but there is also a new and significant obstacle for those who are excluded from this process. The construction of legal and administrative boundaries which delimit the European space, projecting themselves often towards its exterior, renders Europe less a fortress than an area of difficult access. The introduction of European citizenship has, therefore, rendered the system of stratification yet more complex, strengthening its role as a filter aimed at selecting acceptable categories of persons (Rigo, 2005). External and explicit control mechanisms on migrations have evidently been reinforced by this: the Schengen system of visas and the Eurodac database in particular represent tools which are not always effective but are highly selective (Campesi, 2015; Ferraris, 2017; Infantino, 2016). Mechanisms of an internal kind have undergone important modifications: for those who have entered in a “legal” way, access to European territory now represents access to greater possibilities of movement, but it also means simultaneous insertion into a system of detailed controls. In this regard, the implicit and internal mechanisms play a paramount role: the way in which single states interpret the European legislation regulating expulsions represents a continuous threat against the right to stay for foreigners, who see their concrete chances of entering and living in specific states, or even in the entire space of the Union, quickly shrinking.

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This reveals another dimension in the selective nature of European membership, which is to say, its lack of indifference to territorial origins. In other words, the formal equality guaranteed to the status of European citizen does not correspond to a substantial equality: expulsion decrees undertaken for economic reasons, and above all for reasons of security and public order, do not affect those belonging to the various member states in the same way. In general, a German citizen is “safer” so far as expulsion goes than is a Romanian citizen: at least as long as the former does not exhibit attitudes or behaviours—such as occupying a structure or living in the street—which render him, apart from the penal consequences for his actions, a “dangerous” or “undesirable” person in the eyes of the institutions, the former is the object of more careful and frequent controls and risks expulsion to a greater extent. Stereotypes and prejudices regarding his/her origins render him/her more vulnerable, irrespective of his/her condition of formal equality with the citizens of the other EU states. Things change in part so far as local memberships are concerned. These act as equalisers of different statuses: a citizen and a non-citizen with a “regular” stay permit who live in the same city are granted the same formal recognition at the municipal level, and thus find themselves in a condition—however limited and unstable it might be—of “equality”. These memberships are therefore forms of local citizenship.6 But precisely like state citizenship—defined by Hannah Arendt as the “tremendous leveller” of differences of class, sex and ethnic origin, insofar as the price of internal levelling has historically coincided with new forms of external exclusion, to the detriment of the citizens of less powerful and wealthy countries—municipal memberships can transform into instruments of discrimination and selection. They are often employed as instruments of exclusion of undesirable categories of the municipal population. In these cases, the failure to recognise local membership renders the system of statuses still more complex and fragmentary, provoking a multiplication of its levels: two non-citizens who possess the same stay permit occupy the same formal position in the hierarchy of civic stratification, but they find themselves in reality on two different rungs of the same ladder if one of the two possesses municipal citizenship and the other does not.

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The process described here exemplifies the tendency already noted towards multiplication of status borders and produces specific forms of dominion and exploitation, which show different variations on the relation between authority, territory, status and rights. In the neoliberal scenario, this process is fully compatible with the rhetoric of the borderless economy, which manifests in the creation of multiple spaces and political techniques for differentiated governments within the national territory (Ong, 2006, p.  11). Indeed, in the central areas of the world, there is evidently a diversified use of governing techniques, which manage populations in relation to territories which themselves are treated in a non-­ homogeneous manner, producing effects of gradation within sovereignty and citizenship (ibid.). In other words, to different groups—or at least to groups that are perceived and represented as such—there correspond alternative distributions of privileges and protections, which reflect the various modalities of participation in economic activities. In giving form to systems of status borders and frameworks of civic stratification, the regulatory tools which regulate the passage of non-­ citizens from one status to another play a central role. The rules of transition (Bauböck, 1991) substantially establish the requisites which non-members must possess if they are to acquire a legal status of a higher order or to maintain that which they currently possess. The requirements, which differ from state to state, must in theory conform to impersonal and universalistic procedural principles so as to not compromise the legitimacy of the entire system (Rinaldini, 2010), but in fact they are often affected by an evident discretionary power. The discretionary nature of the rules of transition exacerbate the exclusionary effects owing to the criteria that inspire them. At the bottom of these rules, one indeed finds the principle of merit (Lockwood, 1996), which is defined in terms of capacity for self-sustainment and absence of criminal offences (Morris, 2003). There thus clearly emerges “an economistic and securitarian ideology beneath the regulation of migratory processes of the countries of destination” (Rinaldini, 2010, p. 109): only if one is capable of demonstrating that one does not constitute a security threat and that one has an income, in general deriving from employment, is it possible for one to effect a transition from a temporary status to a more stable condition.

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Access to the upper strata of the system of civil stratification is therefore rendered difficult by the rules of transition and by the principles that inspire them, while permanency in the inferior strata—but often also in the middle and higher strata—is rendered uncertain by bureaucratic mechanisms. The borders surrounding the local level play a central role from this point of view: the statuses attributed to the state level become concrete through the action of local administrations. Consequently, when a municipality denies the status of local citizen to a person, it empties a given legal status from within. More specifically, the action of the local administrations demonstrates how the multilevel system of membership statuses is unstable and less structured than it seems to be at first glance. That which occurs in the lower levels can call into question apparently solid statuses which are attributed to the higher. And this is true even when the action of municipalities is not particularly visible and passes through the use of administrative instruments and bureaucratic practices which, in theory, should not modify the requirements made in this matter by state and supranational laws.

3.5 The Meanings of Local Citizenship The concept of local citizenship does not have a single meaning. Its referential context varies on the basis of its different definitions: the adjective which qualifies this form of status is sometimes “urban” and other times, more generically, “local”. The decision to use one or the other of these two terms might derive from the choice to concentrate on urban spaces— considering therefore the cities of medium-large dimensions as specific spaces in which a form of territorial membership might be constructed— or on municipalities as such, even when these are very small. In the first case, the emphasis on urban centres of a certain size, imagined as “special” spaces in which urban citizenship might be realised, recalls, more or less explicitly, the fracture between city and countryside, which historically accompanies both the process which constitutes modern states and the scientific-social reflections on democracy and on the government. “The city air makes one free”, as a widespread saying in

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medieval Germany had it. Urban spaces, as compared to rural contexts, were indeed perceived to be places of freedom and emancipation. Later, sociological theory—in particular, that of Simmel and the Chicago school—insisted on this liberating and emancipating dimension of the city. Today, some research reports of international organisations underline how, with respect to certain questions—for instance, the management of immigration and civil rights—urban centres, as compared to rural areas, constitute spaces in which solidarity, respect and open welcome might arise in more advanced and structured forms (OEDC, 2018; Unesco, 2019). Moreover, this attention on cities permits a connection between the theme of local citizenship and that of the means of the political government of the metropolitan areas and the city-regions, and of their economic role in global capitalism (Scott, 2019). In the second case, the missing distinction between cities and urban centres of small or medium dimensions turns one’s attention to the local level as such—a social context framed as an autonomous political community in relation, or even in opposition, to the state. It is no longer the city to represent an “exceptional” place, gifted with characteristics that render it unique as compared to rural zones; but it is municipalities, even small or medium-sized ones, which constitute a social microcosm differing from the states. Within them, consequently, forms of membership and possibilities for emancipation might arise which would be unthinkable on the state level. Some scholars, moreover, underline how in urban centres of small and medium dimensions experiments of various kinds of solidarities might be made, in a more intense form than that practised in the large urban centres. The case of reception of persons requesting asylum is typical in this regard: in recent years, in various countries, including Italy, forms of widespread aid from below but also institutional policies actuated by local governments, have demonstrated how inclusion might be practised more often and better on the micro level than on the macro (Bonizzoni, Marzorati, & Semprebon, 2017). The various conceptions are, moreover, differentiated from one another by the way in which local citizenship is considered: is it a legal status or a set of social and political practices?7 Put in another way, is citizenship a form of territorial membership, which is such only if it acquires a well-­ defined legal form, or is it a complex of behaviours, of “citizenship acts”,

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which express interest in the collective questions in a given territorial context? In the first case, the dimension of formal membership is emphasised, while in the second, the dimension of substantial belonging and of participation in the public life is highlighted. Very often, it is the second dimension which stands at the centre of research into these matters. In studies on local citizenship, this category is predominately treated as a bottom-up process, carried out by grassroots activists who intend to expand and to consolidate immigrant rights (Coll, 2011; Ehrkamp & Leitner, 2003; Pincetl, 1994; Rocco, 1999; Siemiatycki & Isin, 1997). While the question of rights is relevant here, the focus on the real dynamics of participation and activism relegates the agency of the local authorities and the role of local governments to the background. The concrete practices of local citizenship give concreteness to collective action on the local level and impel towards a transformation of political membership. Direct experiments of participatory democracy—for example, participatory budgeting, open-space technologies, forums, public juries and inquiries, round tables and consultations—are integrative parts of this idea of local citizenship (Melo & Baiocchi, 2006; Silver, Scott, & Kazepov, 2010). The studies that employ this idea, understanding it as a set of practices, thus intersect with research into participatory democracy, which is to say with a current of studies which flourished in the 1990s and the 2000s (Beaumont & Nicholls, 2008; Fung & Wright, 2003). Other research focuses instead on the connection between participation and recognition. In these cases, the agency of the local authorities and the role of local governments emerge in a clearer manner. More specifically, within these studies, the de facto condition of resident within a territory is considered to be the basis for legitimising formal participation in decision-making processes (Bauböck, 2003; Ford, 2001; Holston, 1999; Isin, 2000; Purcell, 2003; Varsanyi, 2006, 2007). The dimension of political participation is placed in the foreground, and thus the recognition of political rights becomes the primary demand, which might also translate into the recognition of a genuine formal status. According to these scholars, those who are de facto members of a community—given that they live and work within the borders of a municipality or perhaps send their children to local schools—ought to be recognised de jure, irrespective of their citizenship and their legal status. Here, however, the

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question of the recognition of the status of local citizen in a formal sense arises to such an extent that it becomes central, but it does so beginning through an initial attention towards the political practices put into effect by residents. The primary dimension of local citizenship, that relative to the attribution of a formal status, is, on the other hand, central to other studies, which concentrate on local authorities and on their role in furnishing legal recognition. These studies tend to occupy themselves with the means with which certain municipalities furnish membership to foreign persons who are considered irregular by state laws (Briffault, 1993; Chauvin & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2012; De Graauw, 2014, 2016; Gebhardt, 2015; Marrow, 2012; Varsanyi, 2006, 2007, 2010). This way, a mechanism of “local production of formal citizenship” is put into action (Chauvin & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2012). The experience of sanctuary cities—in the United States, but not only—is clearly central to theories on this type of local citizenship. The focus is therefore on the local recognition of individuals who are not recognised at the state level. Urban centres, from this perspective, should be able to remedy the status inequalities created by states. In other words, they should be able to reduce civic stratification by furnishing, at least at the local level, equality of recognition to persons regularly present on the territory and persons who are irregularly present on it. The hope for formal recognition, which considers local citizenship a genuine legal status, necessarily poses the question of the relations between various levels of government. The question that arises, more specifically, is the following: what type of authority should be recognised to local governments? According to some scholars, the authority given to the municipalities to institute a formal status of local citizenship also confers upon them a genuine sovereignty in determining the composition of their polities. In the opinion of Alexander Aleinikoff, “urban citizenship is a useful concept only to the extent that urban areas possess legal authority” (Aleinikoff, 2019). Josephine van Zeben, going in the same direction, proposes “the legalisation of urban residency through city-­ zenship”, a status that “would create or formalise an additional set of rights and duties of value for the individuals and their locality” (Van Zeben, 2019). Other scholars, on the other hand, are sceptical with

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respect to the fact that to confer a specific sovereignty on municipalities in the field of local citizenship would render this status the more solid (Aust, 2019). According to Rainer Bauböck, the role of local governments should be contained within a system of multilevel citizenship (Bauböck, 2019). From his perspective, local citizenship should be reinforced, but it should not substitute state citizenship. In the European context, in particular, which is to say in a space in which there exists also a status of supranational membership, local citizenship should be integrated with other statuses, producing a more open and inclusive system. In this book, local citizenship is considered a formal status, not a set of practices. The following chapters will give concreteness to this idea through the in-depth study of the Italian case. More specifically, it will be shown how there exists in Italy a legal status attributed by the local authorities. This status, called residency, expresses simple physical presence in a territory, or, alternatively, the existence of the resident’s interests within it, be these interests material or affective. This status is recognised on the local level, but it is legislated on the state level. Municipalities, in other words, manage the registration of the persons present in their territories through a formal mandate granted by the central powers, which remain the exclusive title holders—which is to say, the exclusive “sovereigns”—with respect to any decision relative to the requisites necessary to attribute the status of local citizen. In Italy, therefore, local citizenship is a status inserted within a multilevel system—the lower level is not autonomous, but answers to rules and criteria decided at higher levels—and located throughout the entire state territory: each municipality, and not only the large cities, is called upon to manage the procedures for recognising residency. This forms a legal status whose attribution clearly rests on pre-legal motivations. These motivations, however, have nothing to do with the sphere of public action and with political participation—in other words, with acts of citizenship. It is rather a person’s mere presence within the territory—or, alternatively, in the case of persons who are not well-rooted in a specific municipality or who lead itinerant lifestyles, the fact that this territory is central to their affective or economic interests— which gives substance to local citizenship. In Italy, therefore, residency is a formal status whose pre-legal foundation is not constituted by behaviours and actions of a political or

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participatory character, but is rather given by the institutional necessity to “capture”, in an administrative sense, information regarding the presence and the movements of persons, which is to say to observe the population both in a static and in a dynamic sense. More specifically, the functions of local citizenship are, on the one hand, to monitor the presence of persons in a territory so as to favour a greater allocation of resources and a more effective sharing of costs, and, on the other, to guarantee the effective exercise of rights. The dimension of participatory action and that of active work within the community are entirely alien to the reasoning behind residency. And yet, as we will see more clearly in what follows, many municipalities tend to claim, often through concrete actions, the power to decide who to register and who not to register, sometimes using a person’s lack of employment as a pretext for excluding him/her from civil registration. In this way, they distort the function of residency as a monitoring instrument, transforming it into a selective tool (Gargiulo, 2016). With their actions, these municipalities exercise a de facto “sovereignty”, which is wholly illegitimate—insofar as it is not recognised by state laws—but not for this reason inefficacious. The Italian case thus shows not only how citizenship as a formal status concretely works but also the risks associated with its use, and its abuse, on the part of the local authorities.

3.6 L ocal Citizenship from the Past to Nowadays Historically, local citizenship has existed both as a status and as a set of practices. Before the formation of modern states, cities were central places from the political and economic points of view: within them, political participation, though it was limited to certain groups of persons rather than being ascribed to the entire population, was a central element in defining membership.

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The First Stage of Local Citizenship The very term “citizenship” emerges from the city-states of Athens and Rome, before being reinvented in the Middle Ages and the modern age in the context of the free Renaissance cities (Bauböck, 2003). In the cities of the Late Middle Ages, which had acquired a growing centrality before being incorporated within state formations, access to the territory was often strictly regulated. In many cases, actual walls filtered incoming persons (Jütte, 2014). On the contrary, the conferring of membership was not very rigid or binding. The requirements for recognition hinged less on the possession of a formal status than on the non-membership of groups considered “undesirable” or “dangerous”: the bearers of infective or contagious diseases, vagabonds, beggars and members of religious minorities. Whoever belonged to these groups8 was treated in a discriminatory way from the legal point of view, not only insofar as he/she was a foreigner but also insofar as he/she was an artisan, miserabilis persona, bandit, merchant or priest (Storti, 2012). Local citizenship as a formal status was not yet defined in an entirely clear way and did not determine the permission or refusal given to a person who wished to enter into a given space. Certainly, documents like letters of authorisation and safe passage, which “identified” persons, and to some extent certified their legal status, were widespread in pre-modern epochs, anticipating the present instrument of the passport. Freedom of movement, however, did not depend in a binding way on one’s formal membership. It was rather tied to specific social memberships (Costa, 2017). In the medieval period, more specifically, legal identity was never attributed in a definitive way as there were numerous territorial authorities that recognised it (Costa, 1999). Moreover, the recognition of rights was not rigidly established, and, above all, it was not limited to the holding of legal statuses—as it would later become for the status of state citizen or of the person—which were uncoupled from the substantial condition of membership in specific categories or social groups. In other words, the path towards homogenisation had not yet been taken—a path which would make everyone residing in the city legally equal without any distinction (Feci, 2003). In this historical phase, the recognition of the

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status of civis manifested only on determinate occasions, which is to say, at those moments when certain persons, desiring to obtain protection, asked to be inserted into the lists of taxpayers. The status of citizen was understood therefore as a relation of payment-protection: the personal protection of one’s goods was subordinated to payment of taxes, which established one’s membership in the city (Vallerani, 2017). Among these members, furthermore, some—who had a revenue exceeding a certain threshold and who could boast having been born in the city—had access to positions and to offices. Political participation, in consequence, constituted a higher level than “simple” membership (ibid.). The pre-modern status of local citizen, therefore, appears to have been fluid and incompletely defined on the formal plane. The authority that attributed it reserved recognition and rights to those persons who, being present on the territory in a more or less established way, could be placed within specific social categories. Those who belonged to these categories, in short, were not such insofar as they had been recognised by rigid and universal legal rules, but because they were part of an entity which was held to be collective—the city—on the basis of motivations that exceed the bounds of law and fall within field of morality and of economic interests. A corporatist metaphor dominated the scene: the citizen was considered part of the “body”, constituting the overall articulation which was altogether differentiated in its parts. The function that individuals had within the “social organism” determined whether they were members of the city in the legal sense. Following the passage to the modern age, the scenario changed substantially. The slow construction of capitalism altered the political equilibrium, paving the way for a system centred on the simultaneous presence of different political actors, each sovereign over specific portions of territory. This institutional context was also new from a social and economic perspective, and it was characterised by the emergence of the state as the dominant assembly. The cities, as a consequence, lost relevance and autonomy in favour of the affirming political actors, while state citizenship became the central status, rendering local memberships ever less important.

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Controlling Mobility at the Local Level As previously seen in Chap. 2, the growth of the state has meant the development of the police, namely, a broad set of institutions, activities and purposes, which marked the shift from urban government to the government of bigger territories (Mannori & Sordi, 2001, p. 156). This shift, in turn, was associated with the strengthening of central authorities and the gradual formation of modern administrative apparatuses (Kotkas, 2014, p. 5). Nonetheless, the local level maintained a role, albeit subordinate and not autonomous, within the state organisation. In towns and in the countryside, local authorities were important actors in the enforcement of police ordinances (ibid.). Local subjects were aware of how to take advantage of the legal system and to bring about ordinances that benefited them on a local level (ibid., p. 81). Moreover, the progressive undermining of the traditional forms of authority and social distinctions between estates was made possible by the growth of towns, which created the conditions for new “lifestyles”, the increase in new forms of economic activity, and, consequently, a growth in consumption (Neocleous, 2000, p. 2). One of the primary reasons underpinning the persistence of the local level is that, as has already been suggested above, control of internal mobility did not vanish with the advent of the states. Limitations on movements between different areas of the national territory long remained in force, above all with respect to certain categories of the population that were considered to be marginal or dangerous. The control over the population was delegated by the states to municipal actors, who consequently could not exercise, at least formally, any autonomous sovereignty in selecting the persons to whom they would attribute the status of local citizens. A key role in the implementation of such a “multilevel” system of control of mobility was played by the enclosure of the common lands. This phenomenon, which stood at the centre of the process of original accumulation described by Karl Marx in the first book of Capital (1867) and by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation (1944), took place in various European countries starting from the last centuries of the Middle Ages.

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The privatisation of spaces, which consequently were no longer available for communal use, marked an essential passage in the birth of “Western” capitalism. Enclosures provoked a flight from rural areas to urban ones and made people formerly able to gain their subsistence in an autonomous way dependant on the conditions of the rising labour market. Consequently, enclosures pushed political authorities to manage the effects of a new form of poverty. The policing of the poor, since then, has become one of the main concerns of the states. The reform of beneficence was characterised by a detailed and strict control of mobility, and it was entrusted to the local authorities. The prohibition on begging, the subordination of subsidies to conditional criteria—which is to say, the distinction between “true” and “false” forms of poverty—and forced labour as a strategy for correcting deviant behaviours were all activities carried out at the municipal level (Coccoli, 2014). The tendency to regulate aid was subsequently reinforced: the policies against poverty which were realised in England between the 1500s and the 1800s aimed at limiting the movements of those indigent and needy who were considered “undeserving”, attempting to control them and, at the same time, ensuring that they would not become a threat to security (Polanyi, 1944). The Poor Laws issued in 1536 and in 1601 decreed that physically capable—and thus “deserving”—poor persons should be put to work, to earn themselves the support they would receive from parishes. These last, so as to bear the weight of this aid, funded their efforts through local taxes and duties on owners and tenants. The Statute of Artificers of 1563, on the other hand, regulated remunerations and payment schedules, seeing at the same time to the imposition of work and mandatory apprenticeships. Overall, these laws produced a rigidly regulated society, and imagined a world in which indolence had been banned and employment activities were sedentary (Feldman, 2013, pp.  31–32). This project of societal transformation was, however, difficult to realise. There were several reasons for this. In the first place, there were simply too many persons involved: the category of the poor was almost equivalent in extent to that of the “common people”, which is to say, it coincided with the totality of persons in the society—excluding land-owners—who found

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themselves—or who might easily find themselves—in a condition of need (Polanyi, 1944). In the second place, mobility was difficult to effectively control. The laws against vagrancy then in force were quite strict, and mandated arrests, corporal punishment and even death for those who transgressed them. The category of ‘vagrant’, however, although it was conceived in theory in a broad sense, in truth contained a minority of persons. There, thus, remained the problem of what to do with the majority of the mobile population (Feldman, 2013, p. 32). The solution was found in toughening those legal instruments that were already available, such as that of settlement, which expressed the place in which one puts down roots, the place in which each poor person was supposed to belong. This notion, which underpinned the laws on poverty and those against vagrancy, took on a new meaning, transforming itself into a rigid limitation on access to beneficence. Before the failures of the attempts to regulate mobility through internment in structures and making work compulsory, the authorities choose a new “line of defence”: the right to social benefits as a mechanism of containment (ibid., p. 35). The Act of Settlement and Removal of 1622, issued to regulate those domestic migrations of peasants which followed the various commons enclosures, required the recipients of aid to remain within the parish in which he/she was resident, and established that the individual parish institutions could refuse to accept new immigrants whenever they were not capable of sustaining the costs for their subsistence (Conti & Silei, 2005, p. 18). The law essentially identified in a clear way a domicile of reference to which the presence of the poor could be limited, ensuring that they would not unduly distance themselves from this domicile (Girotti, 2002, p.  101). Also in other countries such as Sweden, “sixteenth and seventeenth-century ordinances emphasised the responsibility of local parishes to take care of their ‘own’ poor and not to allow them to wander around the realm begging” (Kotkas, 2014, p. 57). The strategy of containing movement, as we have seen before, is a key feature of the development of policing as an activity aimed at fostering production processes within a certain social order: “whereas in its immobilizing activities police sought to render disorderly elements harmless, in its mobilizing activities it sought to fashion these elements into a mobile

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and active workforce” (Neocleous, 2000, p. 17). However, the idea that workers should not move beyond the parish district in which they had put down roots and that the ecclesiastical offices were obliged to aid only their own residents stood in contrast to the needs of the economic system and the need for a workforce, as expressed by the expanding class of capitalistic actors. Under the pressure of the industrial owners, the limitations established by the Act of Settlement were abrogated in 1795: following this, the workers were free to move to areas where there was a greater demand for them.9 The elimination of the restriction on mobility made the forms of control over it less stringent, but it certainly did not annihilate them altogether. In revolutionary France, the Law on the Municipal Police of 1791 focused directly on the poor and unemployed: it did not require that these live in a permanent manner in a given municipality, but it did order the local authorities to watch these persons with suspicion and to monitor them in a special way. More specifically, the law stipulated the following: “workers without either means of subsistence or a sponsor were to be registered as vagabonds (gens sans aveu); those who failed to indicate a previous domicile as ‘suspicious persons’ (gens suspects); and, finally, those shown to have made false declarations were to be identified as ‘illintentioned persons’ (gens malintentionnés)” (Torpey, 2019, p. 43). This mistrust towards mobile people is part of a wider change in the conception of the condition of labouring poor. Indeed, in the eighteenth century, they were perceived as one undistinguished mass: “although some attempts were made to distinguish between poverty and pauperism, or the deserving and undeserving poor, in general ‘labourers’ and ‘poor’ were spoken of interchangeably, and often amalgamated in the term ‘labouring poor’”. But an evident change in this view emerges in the scripts of Patrick Colquhoun between the end of the eighteenth and the first years of the nineteenth centuries, where a clear distinction between poverty and indigence is drawn (Neocleous, 2000, pp. 52–53). According to Colquhoun, poverty is the “state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus labour in store, and, consequently, no property […] the state of every one who must labour for subsistence”, while indigence is “the state of any one who is destitute of the means of subsistence, and is unable to labour to procure it to the extent nature requires” (ibid.).

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Poverty “is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient of society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man—it is the source of wealth, since without labour there would be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth”, whereas indigence “is the evil … It is the state of any one who is destitute of the means of subsistence, and is unable to labour to procure it to the extent nature requires” (ibid.). The distinction between poverty and indigence played a strategic role in the definition of police. Compared with poverty, “pauperism appears immediately as ‘unnatural’ as well as antisocial, a deformity which insinuates itself into that natural order which the discourse of political economy, the discourse on wealth, purported to establish” (Procacci, 1991, p. 159). In more detail, pauperism is thus poverty intensified to the level of social danger: the spectre of the mob; a collective, essentially urban phenomenon. It is a composite (and thereby all the more dangerous) population which “encircles” the social order from within, from its tenements, its industrial agglomerations. It is a magma in which are fused all the dangers which beset the social order, shifting along unpredictable, untraceable channels of transmission and aggregation. It is insubordinate, hidden from the scrutinizing gaze of any governing instance. (Procacci, 1991, p. 158)

The overall project of the science of the police thus hinges on the identification and implementation of the mechanisms necessary to prevent the poverty-stricken class from falling into indigence and from there into crime (Neocleous, 2000, p. 54). Within this project, the control of mobility plays a strategic role, being tightly intertwined, on the one hand, with policing as prevention of crime and law enforcement, and, on the other hand, with the social police as assistance to the poor. Consequently, local citizenship emerges from these processes as the negative right to move within the territory of a country and, at the same time, as the imposition to be settled in a specific municipality. Of course, it is not a status granting autonomy and freedom; it is rather the effect of political decisions taken at the central level and affecting the local levels of government.

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Knowing the Population at the Local Level A second reason behind the fact that the local authorities have maintained a role, albeit subordinate, in the management of the population and of its mobility has to do with the need for information felt by the states in the course of their process of formation. As we saw in Chap. 2, the state dimension assumed by police power demanded new tools and strategies to know the characteristics of the entire country and its inhabitants, and the consequent need to know which persons were present on the territory favoured the development of strategies and techniques of identification and of registration. The municipalities, charged with managing their effective application, took the route of consolidating these demographic instruments. Historically, censuses and registers are interwoven and not easily distinguishable from each other, as their functions are quite similar. Population registers have been used since the ancient time (Mann, 1986): the first date back to the second century and were realised by the Chinese dynasty of Han (Osce, 2009). Such devices were employed, for example, for military, economic, tributary and electoral purposes. Demographic surveys were conducted more with the technique of register than with that of census (Istat, 1992, p.  7), even though they were often called censuses. In the Middle Ages, the use of censuses effected on wide territories had practically disappeared, leaving greater space to forms of registration realised at the local level. The Roman Church played a strategic role in this direction, instituting parochial registries of the “baptised”, of the “deceased” and of “matrimonies” (Poulain & Herm, 2016). However, these registers, despite having fiscal purposes, had above all religious aiming at allowing the ecclesiastical control over the lives of the faithful (Gallo & Gargiulo, 2019, p. 4). Over the course of the modern age, as a result of the resolutions adopted by the Council of Trent in 1563, the observation of population movements became systematic. In particular, the practice of registration of the most important demographic facts became widespread on the part of the parishes; these facts included marriages, deaths (burials) and births

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(baptisms). In various contexts, the political authorities recognised parochial registries as official sources of information, sometimes substituting the clergy with state and municipal officials, and in other cases considering it a peripheral state institution (Poulain & Herm, 2016). With the affirmation of modern states, censuses reappeared on the scene of political administration, but their use was still confused with that of registers. In German-speaking areas, especially after the Thirty Years War, this device became central within the science of police. According to Georg Obrecht, a high official of the city of Strasburg who was also Rector of its university, policing had three tasks: information gathering, conceived as a sort of statistical table bearing on all the capacities and resources of population and territory; establishing a set of measures to augment the wealth of the population and enrich the coffers of the state; maintaining the public happiness (Pasquino, 1991, p.  113). Obrecht synthesised his idea in a formula: census and censura. The first was meant as the obligation of each person to pay his taxes, while the second referred to the idea that public powers had to take charge of the people’s lives, the life of each and all (ibid.). Augmenting the happiness of the citizens, considered both as a whole and as single individuals, hinges therefore on the technical possibility of guaranteeing that the different members of society contribute to collective well-being and acquiring information about them. To this end, Obrecht envisaged elected functionaries—called deputaten—whose function was to inspect and manage the population (ibid.). The terminological confusion between censuses and registers is reinforced by observing the function attributed to the first: state functionaries had to maintain population data on an almost daily basis with registers of deaths, births, etc. In this same period of time, moreover, the attention on statistics and measurement of certain characteristics of the population went hand in hand with that on the form of the spaces in which people live. Urban spaces were a specific concern for the institutions as they were considered vessels of dangerous individuals and illnesses, being as such a threat to public health and hygiene, both in a medical and a moral sense. The link between the knowledge of spaces and the desire to shape them is exemplified by the way the military camp was conceived and designed within military manuals of the seventeenth century. This structure was the ideal

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model of the “observatories” of human multiplicity, namely, of those devices thought to scrutinise the variety of natural and social phenomena: “the military camp—the short-lived, artificial city, built and reshaped almost at will; the seat of a power that must be all the stronger, but also all the more discreet, all the more effective and on the alert in that it is exercised over armed men. In the perfect camp, all power would be exercised solely through exact observation; each gaze would form a part of the overall functioning of power” (Foucault, 1991, p. 171). Hence, the camp is the diagram of a power that acts by means of general visibility and through its geometrical proportion and organisation (ibid.). Besides the military manuals designing a perfectly shaped camp, the seventeenth-century regulations concerning the measures to be taken when the plague appeared in a town also contain a model for the organisation of the city. These regulations prescribe to shape an “enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which all movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead—all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism” (ibid., p. 197). The same bind between the knowledge of spaces and the desire to shape them emerges later, in the works of Guillauté, a military engineer who, in 1749, designed the réseau serré de papiers. This was a sort of register made of files containing detailed information about the inhabitants of certain urban areas. He suggested that police forces should collect data about people and the urban centres in which they live by partitioning cities in segments, each of them surveilled by a single policeman, in charge of knowing all the individuals living within it (Heilmann, 2007, p. 3). With the growth of state functions between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, demographic instruments took on a more stable structure and a better-defined role. These devices were structured in a system internally divided and functionally articulated. On the one hand, censuses, from simple operations of fiscal tallies, were transformed into

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broader and more complex investigations; on the other hand, a national network of population registries was built up (Gallo & Gargiulo, 2019, p. 4). Basically, censuses and registers have split ways: the first took on statistical functions, while the second were used for administrative aims concerning elections, conscription, tributes, hygiene and health, assistance, and so on. (Istat, 1992, p. 8). The French Revolution marked an important passage in this respect. The necessity of documenting the members of the nation, attributing to them full civil and political autonomy, presupposed a detailed identification of the members of the community. Given the delicacy of these functions, the state authorities decided to centralise them, withdrawing from the Church the task of keeping track of the population and of its movements (Torpey, 1998, p. 254). The Law on the Municipal Police of 1791, cited above, required of local authorities to effect a census on all inhabitants and to institute a civil registry containing a broad set of data regarding the persons within it: name, age, birth place, previous domicile, occupation and means of subsistence (ibid., pp. 42–43). The affirmation of biopolitics as the new paradigm of political rationality, moreover, is accompanied by a growing interest in the statistical representation of certain social processes, such as the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of a population, etc. In the second half of the eighteenth century, these processes, together with a whole series of related economic and political problems, become the specific objects that the first demographers want to know and make the target of their control (Foucault, 2003, p. 243). This kind of activity is made possible through the systematic and detailed use of devices aiming at registering the characteristics and movements of the population. With the beginning of the twentieth century and the growing complexity of the state apparatuses, the documentational needs of the states become ever stronger. Many problems, however, remained unresolved: among these, the registration of the mobile component of the population, which is to say the persons involved in migratory movements (Gallo, 2008). Moreover, the diffusion of civil registration instruments did not follow a linear course, at least up until the second half of the twentieth century. An inquest carried out for the Istat and presented to the Congress of London in July 1905 demonstrated how, at the beginning of the

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century, only three countries—Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands—had instituted an obligatory central civil registry of the population, while in seven other states this instrument remained voluntary (Poulain & Herm, 2016, p. 127). For a more widespread employment of the civil registration, however, we must wait until the second half of the twentieth century. Notwithstanding this, in some countries, the need to acquire information about the mobile population, as well as the desire to avoid depopulation of the countryside and phenomena of massive and rapid urbanisation, made registration devices a strategic resource, pushing state institutions towards their full and rapid implementation. In Italy, laws against urbanisation were issued in 1939 during the fascist regime with the aim of preventing unemployed people from moving towards the cities and obtaining registration there (Gallo, 2012). Similarly, in the China of post-World War II, the hukou system was established in 1958 with the purpose of regulating the access to urban centres and the registration of persons present within them (Mallee, 2003). In both cases, the task of effecting selection procedures was delegated to the municipalities. Consequently, a formal status of local citizenship, legislated at the central state level but concretely managed by municipalities, has taken form. This status is still negatively characterised by the absence of freedom of movement and legal obstacles in the access to social rights.

L ocal Citizenship between the Rise and Decline of the Welfare State In the twentieth century, the rise of the welfare state between the two World Wars and its complete realisation during the 30 years following the end of the Second World War have marked the emergence of a new political rationality, based on the partial redistribution of wealth and the socialisation of some risks as means of de-triggering class conflict. At the core of this political rationality stands the idea of “introducing a middle alternative between those who recommended the moralization of the people and those who advocated class struggle” (Castel, 2003, p. 247). In this way, “a realm of compromise was opened that gave a new meaning to the ‘social’. This was neither simply to mediate the various conflicts of

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interest by social management, nor to overthrow society itself by revolutionary violence, but rather to negotiate compromises between the two different positions. That is, both to transcend the moralism of the philanthropists and temper the socialism of the ‘levelers’” (ibid.). Security is a central concept within the logic of the welfare state and shows all the ambiguities that have characterised it since the affirmation of liberalism as the hegemonic ideology of the bourgeois society. Indeed, the guarantee of social security goes hand in hand with that of civil security, but the targets of these two kinds of protection are quite different. The first is mainly addressed to the “good” members of society and “deserving” marginal groups, involving also the “dangerous” classes insofar as their members accept to be submitted to certain requirements and conditions. The second, on the contrary, is thought to protect “deserving” citizens from the threat represented by “undeserving” individuals. With the affirmation of the welfare state, the process of differentiation of policing into prevention of crime and law enforcement, on the one hand, and the social police, on the other hand, has made manifest all its ambiguities, showing the continuity more than the discontinuity between the two fields of police activity. The core “business” of the police project—if meant in the sense of social police—remains the question of poverty and thus the condition of the class of poverty. The welfare state is above all a way of regulating the poor (Piven & Cloward, 1971). Thus, “since state institutions for the administration of poverty are generally understood by the term ‘social policy’ and administered through the institutions of the welfare state, the expanded concept of police shall be thought of as social police and presented as the project of social security” (Neocleous, 2000, p. xi). At the same time, when policing is meant as prevention of crime and enforcement of law, it continues to focus on marginal groups of society. This becomes more evident if we pay special attention to the notion of the public order, which is probably the main concept adopted by police forces in legitimising their action. From the perspective of the police, maintaining order means protecting the “good” part of the community against the threat of its “bad” part. The defence of the public order therefore involves an act of bordering, which is carried out by means of legal and administrative tools and can have symbolic and material consequences.

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Public order is an intrinsically controversial notion. If we observe the contemporary Italian legal order, we find two different conceptions of public order (Di Raimondo, 2010): the first is a material conception, while the second is an ideal conception. On the theoretical level, the ideal public order is considered typical of an “ethical” state, that is to say, a political regime that becomes the bearer of particular values and principles to the detriment of other normative orientations, possibly by imposing an official religion or certain behaviours in the sexual sphere. The material public order, on the other hand, is referred to as a “liberal” state, that is to say, a neutral and secular system on the level of values, in which the public authorities simply guarantee the protection of the personal sphere against concrete interferences and in which, therefore, the exercise of freedom of expression is conditional upon the respect of the rights of others—in particular, private property and freedom of movement. In summary, the ideal public order concerns the management of the conflict between principles, while the material public order concerns the repression of facts and actions that threaten normal everyday living. Officially speaking, the public order which the police claims to be defending and maintaining is of the material, as opposed to ideal, sort. Yet, the way the action of law enforcement is concretely carried out—for example, when policemen attribute to crowds negative characteristics that are functional to their delegitimisation (Gargiulo, 2015)—enters directly into the sphere of ethical and political choices, by considering some as acceptable and others as unacceptable. Such a kind of selection among different values and categories of people who are their bearers is carried out in a circular on evictions issued by the Ministry of the Interior on 1 September 2018,10 intended to give instructions on the management of “arbitrary” building occupations. This document says that among the diversity of interests to be considered, private property takes priority, and can retreat only in the face of situations in which the primary needs of occupiers are at risk of remaining unsatisfied. In this case, the prescriptions of the circular seems to fall within a material idea of order as the defence of private property does not contain in itself an ethical choice. In the case of occupations, however, property is not defended against criminal attacks committed for marauding purposes, but is put before the right to a decent life claimed by people who find themselves in an illegal

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condition mainly due to the absence of public policies in the matter of housing. In this case, we have a conflict between two rights, which are equally established, protected and theoretically guaranteed by the Italian Constitution. Private property is not called into question by the logic of the welfare state. The idea of the social order which underlies this form of political rationality is indeed centred on individuals and their autonomy: “when one offers individuals this extraordinary parachute that is the guarantee of assistance, one authorizes them, in all aspects of their lives, to cut themselves off from all communities, and all possible belongings, beginning with the most basic solidarities of the neighborhood; if there is Social Security I have no need of my next door neighbor to help me. The welfare state is a powerful factor in the growth of individualism” (Castel, 2003, p. 375). Moreover, individuals act in a social and economic environment in which the distinction between owners and non-owners of the means of production is legally formalised and politically, as well as morally, legitimised. Hence, people have the right to be socially assisted by the state in a context in which a certain degree of inequality is not called into question nor eliminated by the institution. The individuals who are part of a welfare state are not imagined as isolated monads but are conceived as members of a state political system. At this stage, citizenship is the main territorial membership status. A world of states, or rather of welfare states, is made of individuals who— apart from certain exceptions—are citizens of (at least) one state, thereby being rights holders. The entitlement of rights, however, is not reserved to citizens. Following the consolidation of welfare policies that arose during the “glorious thirty years”, social rights were extended to non-citizens, who, albeit in the absence of full formal recognition, nonetheless, received equal treatment with respect to full members of a state. On account of this process, which seems to contradict the thesis of Arendt on citizenship as the single “right to have rights” and to lead us towards the affirmation of the concept of personality (Ferrajoli, 1994), there has been a disconnection between status and legal endowment: the same set of protections has been tied to various formal positions. Apparently, genuine “global”, “transnational” and “supranational” citizenships have taken form (Soysal, 1994; Bauböck, 1994; Ong, 2003; Hoffman, 2004; Jacobson, 1996).

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State citizenship, in consequence, seems to become irrelevant in terms of entitlement to rights, insofar as, for example, welfare and healthcare were guaranteed to non-citizens to the same extent as to citizens. Within such a scenario dominated by state and supranational memberships, there seems to be little room for local membership statuses. However, municipalities play a relevant yet invisible role. In this stage, the production of data and information about the population are more important than in the past. The efficient allocation of resources and the accurate knowledge of population’s needs presupposes a detailed monitoring of the single areas of the countries, as to gain awareness of territorial inequalities and imbalances. In order to have data and information effectively collected, local authorities have to be actively involved. Consequently, censuses and population registers have increased their uses and expanded their functions. With the approach of the end of the twentieth century, local citizenship entered into a new season of its life. The political and economic transformations that arose beginning in the 1970s in various parts of the world were accompanied, and favoured, by a vision of the economy and of politics which has been defined neoliberalism. This is a genuine utopian project aiming at the reorganisation of international capitalism and the re-establishment of the conditions necessary for the accumulation of capital by returning power to the economic elite (Harvey, 2005). Neoliberalism, hence, is not an anonymous project, carried on by obscure and invisible forces, but a deliberate strategy that has faces and names (Dardot & Laval, 2013). The neoliberal project has “technicised” politics, remodelling it as an activity of problematisation, which turns attention from social conflicts towards the administration of social life (Ong, 2006). The diffusion of neoliberalism has produced important effects on the system of status. The attack on social rights has undermined the basis of state membership which, in consequence, have been emptied of a portion of their contents. Moreover, important changes in scale have been observed: as shown by Ong, the neoliberal project articulates elements of citizenship within political spaces which, while in some cases they might be narrower than the national territory, in other cases can even exceed its borders (Ong, 2006). From this point of view, it favours the arrival of forms of

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supranational membership and ascribes value to local statuses, in a way which is often selective and exclusionary. So far as the attack on welfare goes, neoliberal policies damage not only the holders of citizenship but also, and above all, those who possess a status of partial recognition. This form of equality between members and non-members of the national body, however, has been called into question by neoliberal policies. The reduction of social costs and of welfare projects has threatened the equality between members and non-­ members of the national body which had been promoted by the welfare state of the “glorious thirty years”. While the rights of EU citizens have been menaced in an evident way, those who have been most strongly affected are individuals who were already in a marginal position within society—often, but not necessarily, those belonging to third countries. The neoliberal transformations have most deeply affected persons with a less than full status, or, in any case, persons whose socioeconomic conditions are less than good (Rigo, 2007; Walters, 2002). In this scenario, local citizenship plays a strategic role. First, because it allows state and supranational actors to monitor and acquire information about a component of the population that is quite mobile and considered to be even more of a potential threat to security. In the last decades, as we have already seen and will see more in depth in the coming chapters, a narrow link between immigration and security has been established by many media and political actors (Guillaume & Huysmans, 2013; Huysmans, 2006). Hence, all the tools consenting states and local authorities to track migrants and their movements are considered as a powerful resource in enforcing security through the control of immigration. Second, local citizenship plays a strategic role because it is able to guarantee the actual exercise of rights and access to welfare at a local level. To this end, the role of the municipalities is crucial, above all as regards non-­ citizens, and has become even more relevant as a process of devolution of political and administrative powers from national to local governments has gradually taken place in many western countries (Birrell, 2009). As an effect of this process, municipalities are charged with new tasks and responsibilities, gaining a certain autonomy (Vandelli, 2002), also as regards social policy. Even though they do not acquire specific

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competencies in the field of registration, they still feel more legitimised to shape the local population in a desired manner by directly intervening in controlling migrations. Consequently, in municipal territories in which rights are effectively recognised, post- or supranational forms of citizenship find concrete realisation: non-citizens, by virtue of their status as semi-members in a legal sense, see their rights recognised to the same extent as citizens. On the contrary, in municipal territories in which their rights are negated, these citizenships are emptied of their contents: rights formally attributed at the state level are impossible to exercise at the local level. Therefore, wherever local citizenship assumes the form of a legal status, it can transform from an instrument of territorial control and of resource allocation into a tool for selecting the “desirable” elements of a population. In this respect, the Italian case, which will be illustrated in detail in the following chapters, constitutes an excellent example of how local citizenship, defined legally as an authentic formal status, can support various sometimes contradictory objectives of population regulation. The Italian case, moreover, shows interesting aspects of the relation between central and local authorities: while the state remains theoretically sovereign in the establishment of rules of municipal membership, the municipalities, historically, have advanced claims, in a more or less explicit and manifest way, regarding the attribution of the status of local community member.

Notes 1. Established by Law-Decree n. 30 of 2007—which implements European Directive n. 38 of 2004—and subsequently modified and integrated by certain successive decrees and by circulars. 2. The members of the states of the European Union although are now designated at an institutional level by the term ‘citizens’, and despite the fact that they are formally included within European citizenship, they do not fully enjoy the right to freedom of movement which citizens in the strict sense enjoy. The existence of a limitation of this kind is, moreover, evinced by the fact that the former can legitimately be held in Identification and Expulsion Centres, places normally thought to be “reserved” to foreigners (Granaglia & Rigo, 2013, pp. 343–345).

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3. These requirements are as follows: having an income superior to a certain threshold, not posing a “danger to the public order or the safety of the state”, passing a test in the Italian language and demonstrating the availability of a suitable dwelling, in case the permission is presented also for relatives. 4. Four, according to the above-cited decree 30/2007: workers, non-­ workers, students and relatives. 5. The concept of hegemony is taken from The Long Twentieth Century by Giovanni Arrighi: this scholar, in turn, taking his inspiration from Gramsci’s distinction between two types of power, one based on dominance pure and simple and the other associated with dominance but augmented by the exercise of “intellectual and moral leadership”, defines hegemony as “the additional power that accrues to a dominant group by virtue of its capacity to put all the issues around which conflict rages on a ‘universal’ plane” (Arrighi, 1994, pp. 27–28). 6. On the concept of “local citizenship”, or of “urban citizenship”, there is wide international debate, as evinced by works like Bauböck (2003), De Graauw (2014), Filomeno (2017), Ford (2001), Holston (1999), Isin (2000), Purcell (2003), Smith and McQuarrie (2012) and Varsanyi (2006, 2007). 7. On this point, and more generally on the meanings of the concept of urban or local citizenship, an interesting debate, started by Rainer Bauböck, was held on the blog Global Citizenship Observatory (Globalcit) http://globalcit.eu/cities-vs-states-should-urban-citizenship-beemancipated-from-nationality/. 8. On membership to the cities as a “hierarchy of qualifications”, see Andreozzi (2016, pp. 14–15). 9. In that same year, the so-called Speenhamland Law was approved, which introduced a system of supplementary income subsidies: the parishes were required to grant a subsidy to every worker, calculated on the basis of the number of children he/she had and the price of bread. In this way, a minimum income was ensured to the poor, but, at the same time, owners were allowed to pay very low wages, since the public aid was disbursed whenever the salary in question was lower than the family revenues, as determined by the scale. The system of Speenhamland ambiguously established the right to live by hindering work from being an effective means of sustenance (Polanyi, 1944, pp. 100–102). 10. Circular n. 11001/2018.

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Ehrkamp, P., & Leitner, H. (2003). Beyond National Citizenship: Turkish Immigrants and the (Re) Construction of Citizenship in Germany. Urban Geography, 24(2), 127–146. Fassin, D. (2010). La raison humanitaire. Une histoire morale du temps présent. Paris: Gallimard. Feci, S. (2003). Cambiare città, cambiare norme, cambiare le norme. Circolazione di uomini e donne e trasformazione delle regole in antico regime. In A. Arru & F.  Ramella (Eds.), L’Italia delle migrazioni interne (pp.  3–31). Roma: Donzelli. Feldman, D. (2013). Settlement and the Law in the Seventeenth Century. In S. King & A. Winter (Eds.), Migration, Settlement and Belonging in Europe, 1500–1930: Comparative Perspectives (pp. 29–53). New York: Berghahn. Ferrajoli, L. (1994). Dai diritti del cittadino ai diritti della persona. In D. Zolo (Ed.), La cittadinanza. Appartenenza, identità, diritti (pp. 263–292). Roma-­ Bari: Laterza. Ferraris, V. (2017). Eurodac e i limiti della legge: quando il diritto alla protezione dei dati personali non esiste. Diritto, Immigrazione e Cittadinanza, 18(2), 1–15. Filomeno, F.  A. (2017). Theories of Local Immigration Policy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ford, R. (2001). City-states and Citizenship. In A. T. Aleinikoff & D. Klusmeyer (Eds.), Citizenship Today: Global Perspectives and Practices (pp.  209–233). Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (2003). Society Must be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. New York: Picador. Fung, A., & Wright, E. O. (2003). Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance. London: Verso. Gallo, S. (2008). Il domicilio di soccorso e altre questioni: spunti per uno studio sulle anagrafi e la mobilità territoriale interna in Italia tra fine Ottocento e fascismo. In E. Sori & A. Treves (Eds.), L’Italia in movimento: due secoli di migrazioni (XIX–XX) (pp. 123–141). Udine: Forum. Gallo, S. (2012). Senza attraversare le frontiere. Le migrazioni interne dall’Unità a oggi. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Gallo, S., & Gargiulo, E. (2019). La residenza tra esigenze amministrative e obiettivi politici: una prospettiva storico-sociologica. In Medici per i Diritti

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Umani-MEDU (Ed.), Le residenze invisibili. Indagine sulle emergenze abitative a Firenze (pp. 16–40). Firenze: MEDU. Gargiulo, E. (2015). Ordine pubblico, regole private. Rappresentazioni della folla e prescrizioni comportamentali nei manuali per i Reparti mobili. Etnografia e ricerca qualitativa, 8(3), 481–512. Gargiulo, E. (2016). Monitoring or Selecting? Security in Italy Between Surveillance, Identification and Categorisation. In E. Orrù, M. G. Porcedda, & S.  Volkmann (Eds.), New Philosophical Perspectives on Surveillance and Control (pp. 195–216). Freiburg: Nomos. Gebhardt, D. (2015). Cities and Immigrant Citizenship. A Comparison of Local Citizenship Policies in Barcelona and Munich. Working Paper Series of the Grup de Recerca Interdisciplinari en Immigració—UPF Departament de Ciències Polítiques i Socials Universitat Pompeu Fabra, p. 26. Girotti, F. (2002). Welfare state. Storia modelli e critica. Roma: Carocci. Granaglia, E., & Rigo, E. (2013). Eccesso di disuguaglianze? In C.  Saraceno (Ed.), Stranieri e disuguali. La disuguaglianza nei diritti e nelle condizioni di vita degli immigrati (pp. 339–364). Bologna: Il Mulino. Guillaume, X., & Huysmans, J. (2013). Citizenship and Security: The Constitution of Political Being. London: Routledge. Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heilmann, E. (2007). Comment surveiller la population à distance ? La machine de Guillauté et la naissance de la police modern. Archive Ouverte en Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication. Retrieved from http://archivesic. ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00125574. Hoffman, J. (2004). Citizenship Beyond the State. London: Sage. Holston, J. (Ed.). (1999). Cities and Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press. Horvath, K., Amelina, A., & Peters, K. (2017). Re-thinking the Politics of Migration. On the Uses and Challenges of Regime Perspectives for Migration Research. Migration Studies, 5(3), 301–314. Huysmans, J. (2006). The Politics of Insecurity. Fear, migration and asylum in the EU. London: Routledge. Infantino, F. (2016). Outsourcing Border Control. Politics and Practice of Contracted Visa Policy in Morocco. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Isin, E. F. (Ed.). (2000). Democracy, Citizenship, and the Global City. London: Routledge. Istat. (1992). Anagrafe della popolazione. Legge e regolamento anagrafico (“Annuario statistico italiano”, series B, 29). Roma: Istituto nazionale di statistica.

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Jacobson, D. (1996). Rights Across Borders. Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship. London: The John Hopkins University Press. Joppke, C. (2010). Citizenship and Immigration. Cambridge: Polity Press. Jütte, D. (2014). Entering a City: On a Lost Early Modern Practice. Urban History, 41(2), 204–227. Kotkas, T. (2014). Royal Police Ordinances in Early Modern Sweden. The Emergence of Voluntaristic Understanding of Law. Leiden: Brill. Lockwood, D. (1996). Civic Integration and Class Formation. British Journal of Sociology, 47(3), 531–550. Lorey, I. (2015). State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. London: Verso. Mallee, H. (2003). Migration, Hukou and Resistance in Reform China. In E. Perry & M. Selden (Eds.), Chinese Society. Change, Conflict and Resistance. London: Routledge. Mann, M. (1986). The Sources of Social Power. Volume 1: A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mannori, L., & Sordi, B. (2001). Storia del diritto amministrativo. Roma-­ Bari: Laterza. Marrow, H. (2012). The Power of Local Autonomy: Expanding Health Care to Unauthorized Immigrants in San Francisco. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 35(1), 72–87. Marx, K. (1867). Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Oekonomie. Hamburg: Otto Meissner. Melo, M.  A., & Baiocchi, G. (2006). Deliberative Democracy and Local Governance: Towards a New Agenda. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 30(3), 587–600. Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, B. (2013). Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham: Duke University Press. Mindus, P. (2017). European Citizenship after Brexit. Freedom of Movement and Rights of Residence. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Morris, L. (2003). Managing Contradiction: Civic Stratification and Migrants’ Rights. International Migration Review, 37(1), 74–100. Neocleous, M. (2000). The Fabrication of Social Order. A Critical Theory of Police Power. London: Pluto Press. OEDC. (2018). Working Together for Local Integration of Migrants and Refugees. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/governance/workingtogether-for-local-integration-of-migrants-and-refugees-9789264085350en.htm.

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4 Residency and Its Meanings

4.1 The Form of Local Memberships At the local level, territorial memberships assume different forms: they can be more or less durable, they can have an objective or subjective foundation and they can have a solid legal quality or on the contrary an ephemeral one. These memberships express bonds with the territories which are gradable in terms of spatial rooting and temporal persistence. The relations to which they refer can vary from an established presence to a purely voluntary relation, and can last for varying amounts of time, anywhere from the temporary contract to the permanent. In the Italian legal system, territorial memberships are legally defined by the Civil Code. Article 43 of this rule introduces the notion of residency (residenza), correlating it with the “place in which the person makes his/her habitual dwelling”, and the notion of domicile (domicilio), which corresponds to that portion of space in which an individual “has established the principal place for his/her affairs and interests”. On the other hand, there exists in the Code no definition of the concept of temporary presence (presenza temporanea).

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In common language, domicile and residency are often used interchangeably. Yet, on a juridical level, they have extremely different meanings. The tendency to consider them equivalent, even in the field of law, derives from the historical trajectory taken by the rules on this subject. The Napoleonic Code of 1804, an inspirational model for many subsequent instances of civil codification in the European states and in Latin America, identifies the domicile as a unique place of relation between individual and space, and thus absorbs the notion of residency (Morozzo della Rocca, 2003, p. 1014). More specifically, the French Code transposes the Romanic tradition centred on the domicilium, whose etymology refers to the notion of domus, the familial house as an environment for the life of the subject. In consequence, the domicile is understood as the principal établissement of a person, and therefore at the same time as the centre of his/her life and interests (Morozzo della Rocca, 2017, p. 24). In the Italian context, in contrast to that of France, the demands of individual mobility are better grasped; the distinction between locations delegated for the completion of different functions is here formally established (ibid.). The first civil code of the Kingdom of Italy, issued in 1865, distinguishes residence from domicile: “the location of a person’s affairs will sometimes differ from the location of his/her affections”. This distinction is then taken up by the law currently in force, and is still the basis of the thinking that governs local memberships in Italy. The juridical notion of residence branches out from the category of domicile. This category is originally unitary, composed of both the material element of dwelling and the “spiritual” element of the establishment of a given place as the location of a person’s affairs and interests, but later it is articulated into two different concepts: the first preserves the initial name while the second acquires a new one (Dinelli, 2010, p. 651). The civil categories, focussed on the place of the person’s physical presence and of his/her juridical activities, translate then into administrative positions, whose objective is to satisfy the needs of territorial government and of public policies. These positions are defined by the laws that regulate the registration in the civil registry (iscrizione anagrafica). In particular, Art. 1 of the population registry law—n. 1228/1954— establishes that “the status relative to those single individuals, families and cohabitations, that have their residency in the municipality is

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registered in the registry office of the resident population, as well as the status of persons without fixed abode that have established their domicile in the municipality”. Art. 2 of the same law clarifies that “the person without fixed abode is considered a resident in the municipality wherein he/she has his/her domicile, or, lacking this, in the municipality of his/ her birth”. Registration in the registry office constitutes then acknowledgement for administration purposes of the local memberships defined by the Civil Code. Put otherwise, this registration represents the bureaucratic translation of the juridical notions of residency and domicile, and involves the acquisition of the status of resident in terms of civil registry. From a technical point of view, civil figures are transformed into status relating to civil registry (anagrafe), whenever fact is followed subsequently by act: namely, registration. The nature of this ‘fact’ differs with respect to the two different conditions. Civil residency is translated into registered residency when an established presence in a given place can be ascertained. Civil domicile, on the other hand, produces the same result when the effective centrality of a municipal territory, from the point of view of a person’s affairs and individual interests, can be demonstrated. Concretely speaking, the person who enjoys civil residency obtains civil registration if he/she habitually dwells within the borders of the municipality. Registration, therefore, takes place once the interested party declares his/her established presence to the municipal offices. Dwelling is not an independent form of territorial membership but a concept that serves to qualify and to substantiate the concept of residency. In this regard, the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat)— the institution entrusted with the duty of overseeing the regular activities of the municipal  registry offices1—distinguishes between a temporary dwelling and a habitual one. The first, which “can be defined as the place where the person is located at a given moment, without the intention of settling there, or at least of remaining there habitually” (Istat, 2010, p. 26), is not relevant to the purpose of civil registration, although it is taken into consideration on the occasion of the census, since it permits a more precise measurement of the composition of the population, and especially of its most mobile and variable segment. It is, on the other

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hand, the second of these which, by referring to the quality of established presence in a place, determines the condition of being a resident. It is therefore a strategic notion, especially at an international level, considering that residence as a formal status is not instituted in all the countries of the world. Indeed, the reference to the habitual dwelling permits comparison between relative censuses in states with different registration systems, or even states that are lacking these altogether insofar as “they do not possess registration offices, and therefore do not possess the population lists derived therefrom” (Istat, 2014, p.18). In this regard, the European regulation on census-taking,2 in Art. 1, refers to the “national, regional and local population in habitual dwellings” and defines this latter concept as “the place in which a person normally spends the period of daily rest, irrespective of temporary absences for recreational activities, holidays, visits to friends and relatives, business, healthcare treatment or religious pilgrimages”. Osce, too, in his Guidelines on Population Registration (2009), strongly focusses attention on this category. The person lacking in civil residency is granted registration if the centre of his affairs and interests is located in the municipal territory within which he requests enrolment. In other words, registration takes place when the person concerned declares he/she does not have a habitual dwelling in a given municipality, but has meaningful relations there. The characteristics of this condition are clarified by the Istat in its operative guidelines.3 The agency specifies that, for civil registration purposes, the person without fixed abode should not be considered one “who for professional reasons or from the lack of stable housing moves frequently within one and the same municipality”, but rather one “who does not have in any municipality that habitual dwelling which is a necessary element for the assessment of residency (e.g. vagrants, artists of travelling-show enterprises, traders and itinerant artisans, etc.” (Istat, 1992, p. 41). The same text underlines that the domicile is “the only element that can link the person without a fixed abode to a given municipality” (ibid.). For this reason, it points out that registration of a domicile in the municipality is in the legitimate interests of the citizen with no fixed abode, giving him/her the possibility to register in the registry office of that municipality, which can be considered—in

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those constant movements which depend on the nature of his/her professional activity—as that to which he/she most frequently belongs, namely where he/she has relatives or a business centre or a representative, or even only his/her only address, and that for him/her might be the most easily attainable toward obtaining the registry certifications that he/she requires. (ibid.)

The explanatory notes of the Istat also describe another kind of person without a stable dwelling who “does not have an address or a real domicile (principal base of his/her affairs) in the municipality, but declares a domicile with the sole purpose of asking and obtaining civil registration”; this person therefore has no address which he/she can “indicate in the registry documentation” (Istat, 1992, p. 45). The Istat therefore distinguishes those with no fixed abode from those who are homeless: the first—for professional or existential reasons—do not live in a stable way in a given municipality: the second conduct their existence within a given municipal perimeter, but without having a real living space and/or without dwelling constantly in a precise place. This distinction is based on fairly uncertain legal foundations, as it is not indicated explicitly in the relevant regulations: the only sources which are binding in this regard, namely the population registry law and the relative executive regulation, refer exclusively to the category of the individual “with no fixed abode”, within which category “all of those persons fall, without distinction, who do not meet the requirements for residency = a established dwelling in any municipality, but who still have the (subjective) right to civil registration because they live permanently in Italian territory” (Minardi, 2005, p.10). Nevertheless, this distinction is very interesting theoretically and sociologically because it expresses various ways standing in relation to the territory which are very different from one another. In the first case, the connection is feeble in terms of material presence, manifesting in brief and fleeting visitations, even if the interested party might have affective and economical interests in the municipal space or might enjoy the use of the interior of an abode there. In the second case, the relation is concrete and day-to-day, given that the individual effectively lives in a given municipality; but it is qualified by the absence of any real housing arrangement. Moreover, the condition of

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having no fixed abode seems to indicate a completely voluntary association between the individual and the local administration, while that of being homeless seems to refer to a more effective bond. In term of procedures, however, the differences tend to fade. Indeed, in this regard, the Istat imparts the following instructions: analogously to the Census, which mandates the institution, in every municipality, of a special “non-territorial” section, in which all “homeless persons” are listed and recorded as residents, there is also perceived the need for the registry office to establish a street, territorially inexistent, but known with a conventional name given by the registrar (e.g. Via … followed by the name of the municipality itself, Via Municipal House, etc.) Both those “homeless” who are counted as residents by the census, and those “without fixed abode” who declare domicile in the municipality but who in reality do not have a real address in the municipality itself, will be registered in this virtual street address, with progressive odd numbers. (Istat, 1992, pp. 45–46)

Both categories of persons considered in the explanatory notes are thus recognised in their being members of a municipality through the expedient of the “virtual” address. The attention given by the Istat to those lacking in a habitual dwelling expresses a historical institutional need—namely the need to track mobile and poorly rooted individuals. This tendency can be better comprehended by focusing briefly on the history of registry offices.

4.2 T  he Meanings and Contents of Local Membership Residency is a juridical status that establishes the privileged relation between an individual and the municipality: considering the different municipal territories within which an individual existence can concretely unfold, there is only one in which the condition of resident holds. It is a dual condition, material and at the same time voluntary, composed of an objective element—the person’s presence in a specific place and

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space—and by a subjective one—the decision to use that place for the purposes of domicile or of residency. Both of these elements, according to the legislation on the subject, are relevant (Morozzo della Rocca, 2003, p. 1014). The centrality of the subjective element—intentionality—is however questionable: The evaluation of habitual dwelling in a place is in and of itself sufficient to establish the existence of residency, without the subject’s contrary will— even if it be expressed in an explicit way—being an obstacle to this, or even if he/she believes he/she resides elsewhere. (Dinelli, 2010, p. 653)

More specifically, a person’s will, if it is not translated into a series of concrete and identifiable behaviours, remains secondary compared to the tangible fact of his/her presence. The voluntary element, in other words, is absorbed by a person’s effective conduct of life (Morozzo della Rocca, 2017, p 18), and to such an extent that the population registry law in Art. 5 makes the following provision: the municipal personnel is required ex officio to register any subject that, while known to be living in the municipal territory, has not however declared this fact to the local authorities. The subjective dimension, therefore, cannot coincide with mere intention, but—as the jurisprudence clarifies—must be revealed “by his/her customs of life and from his/her conducting normal social relations” (Case-law, Sect. II, 14 March 1986, Ord. n. 1738). Residency is thus characterised as a matter of fact: it is a situation based on the established presence of a subject in a certain area, and as such cannot be strongly influenced by the attitude and the intention of the same person, unless this attitude and these intentions translate into a series of evident behaviours (Dinelli, 2010, p. 654). Temporary departure is not included among these. The population registry law actually specifies that “persons temporarily dwelling in other municipalities, or staying abroad for the exercise of seasonal jobs, or for causes of limited duration, do not cease to belong to the resident population” (Art. 3). The Istat, in this regard, specifies that:

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habitualness of dwelling is not incompatible with departures, even frequent ones, whose causes are to be attributed to any number of reasons, as for example holidays or countryside activities (wheat or grape harvesting, etc.) so long as at the end of this period, the party concerned always returns to the same municipality, and thereby demonstrates that this municipality is really considered the municipality relative to the habitual dwelling. (ibid.)

The “objective” logic of residency acts as an identifying criterion for the habitual-dwelling territory for individuals whose lives are lived in various municipal  spaces. The given threshold of a year’s time, in this regard, is indicative: while a person is considered a resident in a given municipality if his/her absence does not exceed the period of a year, if it does exceed, then he/she is considered a habitual dweller elsewhere. This criterion is relevant for Italian citizens who live outside national borders: if they intend to stay in a country other than Italy for a period greater than 12 months, they are required to register in the Registry of Citizens Residing Abroad (AIRE). Beyond these parameters, however, it is not necessarily an easy matter to establish if a person does or does not habitually dwell in a given municipality, especially in the case of certain categories of people. University exchange students, for example, spend a large amount of their lives— often the greater part—in the town in which they study, rather than that from which they hail. Yet, it might be the case that they consider their original municipality, and not that containing the university they attend, as the place of their habitual dwelling. There are, moreover, cases in jurisprudence in which residency has been recognised by municipal administrations in a municipality wherein the declarant spends a tiny number of days annually. In general, compared to people who, over the course of their existence, dwell for an appreciable time in many territorial areas, the decision as to which of these should be considered the central one is not obvious. Put more specifically, there is no clear border between the prevalence of the objective dimension, on the one hand, and that of the subjective dimension, on the other. This state of affairs, as Morozzo della Rocca points out, tends to become further complicated in real-world scenarios:

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at a time in which human existence is given an ever greater degree of mobility, to such an extent that any kind of persistence in their original place of residence is very rare, the function carried out by the will to reside or not to reside in the place where a person comes to live for a certain amount of time (which is however, objectively speaking, not the only place relevant to the existential sphere of this person), should be re-evaluated, albeit with all due prudence, more than is presently done in the field of population registry. (Morozzo della Rocca, 2017, p. 13)

In contrast to residency, the domicile is an entirely voluntary juridical element. The choice to establish one’s own affairs and interests in a given place is a completely free choice. The relation of this choice to the territory does not emerge from one’s habitually dwelling in a precise point in space—that is, in an abode, even if a makeshift one—but rather from the selection of a determinate municipality as central in relation to certain areas of one’s existence. These areas, however, do not concern the economic or working sphere alone, for they involve other sectors as well, as the law highlights: by domicile is meant the place in which a person has established the principal base of his/her affairs and interests; it should not be identified exclusively with regard to economic and capital relations, but also to moral, social and familiar interests, which converge normally in the place where the same person lives with his/her family. It follows that the domicile is characterized by a person’s intention to constitute in a given place the principal centre of his/her familial, social and economic relations. (Case-law, Sect. III, 8 March 2005, Ord. n. 5006)

Affectivity is, therefore, a characteristic that, though it belongs predominately to resident status, also concerns domicile status: under certain conditions, the domicile can represent a centre of one’s “affairs” that has nothing to do with merely instrumental interests. When these conditions are met, the economical sphere cannot be separated from that of the affects, especially if the first coincides with a condition of mere subsistence. The case of the “homeless” is exemplary in this regard. Their day-to-­ day lives, whether from choice or necessity, are not characterised by living

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in an abode, or practising a profession or possessing any assets. For this reason, domicile and residency tend to coincide: the first takes on the existential and not exclusively patrimonial characteristics of the second, becoming “the last (only) place of membership for those who cannot claim any title or private propriety” (Morozzo della Rocca, 2003, p. 1015). The coincidence between residence and domicile, evident in the case of the homeless, highlights certain elements common to the two forms of membership. Setting aside their differences, both show how the bond at the centre of juridical definitions concerns the entire municipal space and not certain specific parts of it: living at a defined point in the municipal territory or moving continually within it are different behaviours that nonetheless similarly determine a person’s membership of a given local administration. The population registry law and its relative regulations, moreover, speak of residency and domicile in the municipality, not in a specific street or square thereof. If we turn our attention from the homeless to those without fixed abode, another crucial characteristic of municipal membership becomes evident: time, if measured in terms of material presence, is irrelevant in the characterisation of a certain kind of municipal membership. The bond between individual and territory, in other words, subsists regardless of the days effectively spent in the municipality of the domicile. Where there is no habitual dwelling place, the condition of residency is embodied in a voluntary relation with the space, which can also be extremely brief in time. The substance of local membership, in this case, is not given by physical rootedness, but by the subsistence of a bond which the interested party perceives as being relevant. Time and space, therefore, by crossing over one another with different modalities, give rise to a different kind of substantial belonging, which indicate, alternatively, the condition of that person who: • lives at a precise point within the municipal space; • moves frequently within one and the same municipality; • spends his/her existence outside of a specific municipal perimeter. To these three forms there might correspond a wider set of lifestyles, especially with reference to housing conditions. Localisability in a clearly

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identifiable portion of the territory is compatible with various existential habits: dwelling in an abode, a caravan, a cave, a shack under a bridge. At the same time, the impossibility of identifying a specific point in space might be owing to dissimilar behaviours: as for example, continuously moving in the area of one and the same municipality, sleeping in different houses or different “irregular fields”, or conducting an itinerant life within the Italian territory but outside a specific municipal perimeter. In summary, the bond that underpins membership of a given municipality can extend from a maximum to a minimum of location: at one extreme, there stands the condition of that person who habitually dwells in the same portion of the municipal territory—be it in an apartment, on a bench in a park or under a portico—while at the other extreme, we find that the person who lives, for the better part of his time, outside of the municipality, conducting an itinerant existence; in the middle, there are those who remain permanently in the same municipality, but who choose, on a case-by-case basis, the place where they will stop to sleep or to pass an hour. Furthermore, this bond can vary between a maximum and minimum of temporal presence: at one pole we find the condition of that person who goes, maybe once a year, to visit a relative living in the locality chosen as his/her domicile, and, on the other hand, we find that person who is physically present, every day, in one and the same municipal territory (Gargiulo, 2019a).

4.3 T  he Slow Institution of a Population Registry in Italy In Italy, the population registries furnish an administrative representation of the municipal population and of its composition, guaranteeing as much as possible a correspondence between the de facto population and the de jure population. The institution of a unified and uniform population registry throughout the entire territory follows a long and rather complicated path (Randeraad, 1996). The first attempt took place between 1862 and 1864 when a population registry was instituted in every municipality on the base of the 1861 census, the year of the

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unification of the country: the specific relative regulation of 1873 was very detailed and complex, including even a special file for the mobile segment of the population, which is to say that population which remained in the municipal territory for a period of time greater than a month without acquiring residency. The Italian state had the ambition to create in every municipality an instrument for recognition comparable to a “daily and perpetual census” (Gallo, 2008, p. 127), by which an exact portrait could be drawn for all the movements of the population. Many local administrations, however, did not adhere to the introduced prescription: a fundamental obstacle arose in the organisational capacities of the individual municipal structures and the cultural level of the municipal workers. The great disparities present in the national territory between cities and countryside, between mountain and lowlands, between North and South, were reflected also in the population registry data collection. The following regulation of 1901 produced a number of clear simplifications, lowering the level of factual requirements connected to the registry offices. “While we must forego demanding of the population registry what it can never indicate with any precision”, it was written at the time, “namely, what the real population of every municipality is, which the census alone can in any given moment count and make known, that registry must remain as a statistical instrument for recording the doings of that part of the population which is the most numerous and also the easiest to observe, which is to say, the stable population” (Leti, Cicchitelli, Cortese, & Montanari, 2002, p.  9). Even with these new provisions, however, it was not possible to attain a satisfactory unity and uniformity in the surveys. In addition to the objective difficulties related to the cultural and organisational deficits mentioned above, another obstacle had been added, which was destined to play an increasingly important role during the twentieth century. With the increase in the functions attributed to the local administrations and the growing complexity of the bureaucratic machine, the population registry was gaining an unprecedented centrality with respect to the general municipal operations. On the one hand, the number of residents was decisive for establishing the size category of the municipality, and thus its fiscal relation with the state administration and the remuneration of its workers, not to speak of the crucial questions of prestige and territorial pre-eminence. On the other

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hand, those persons who were registered in the population registry could have access to the disbursement of state aid directed to the poor, and to the new welfare services connected to healthcare, house and work. Often, therefore, the malfunction of the population registry was owing to specific choices on the part of the municipal administrations: it was not difficult for an official in Italy during the great emigration at the beginning of the twentieth century to turn a blind eye towards the obligation to expunge the names of citizens who had emigrated abroad. In this way, the population figures were inflated with “dead souls” that had no effect on the budgets and who indeed afforded only a series of benefits to the municipality in question. Moreover, at least up until the First World War, since no legal certification had been given to the juridical capacity of women, civil registration at the registry offices was reserved to adult males, the so-called heads of family. This created enormous difficulties for women left alone with their children: without a written authorisation from their husbands—who had perhaps emigrated thousands of kilometres away—these wives could not transfer their registration from one municipality to another. At the same time, however, there was a common tendency on the part of the municipal offices to not enrol people of the lower classes in the registry, those who lived on the margins of society or who had recently immigrated, or else that part of society that was more likely to require assistance and protection. It was no accident that the problem assumed national importance in Italy between the end of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth, with the application of the healthcare reform of 1890. The new reform imposed the obligation on municipalities to pay for the health care of the poor, providing the local doctor’s services at no cost or paying the fee for any hospitalisation outside of municipal territory. In this case the costs fell back on the municipality where the patient had most recently spent a period of at least five years in regular dwelling, or else the person’s municipality of birth. These provisions, which had been read as “initial recognition of the right to hospital assistance” (Frascani, 1986, p. 131), nonetheless assigned a fundamental role to the population registry system: it gave them the power to settle cases of uncertainty or disputes in the attribution of often very expensive hospitalisation fees. At the beginning of the twentieth century in some

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small Italian municipalities, the sum of these expenses covered as much as one-third of the local budget: many of these costs were relative to people who had emigrated years ago to larger cities, but who remained intentionally unregistered in the population registries there. This scenario began to alter between 1926 and 1929, with the creation of the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat) and the adoption of a new population registry law. The Istat legally became “the highest oversight on the regular keeping of population registries”, and thus became responsible to the government for the correctness of a system that remained connected to the concrete work of the municipal officials (Gallo, 2007, p. 177). The new regulation, however, while refining techniques for data collection, was drafted at a moment in which, by reason of a specific political choice, the population registry system had been overloaded with new and burdensome responsibilities. The willingness on the part of Fascism to counter the growth of cities and the depopulation of the countryside was translated into a clear legal responsibility for prefects, who were ordered to “limit the excessive growth of the resident population in the cities” (law of December 24, 1928, n. 2961). The civil registry in this way became the field of a battle waged by the public authorities against the migrants within the national territory, those who move from small cities to big cities, from the country to the town. Ten years later, a new legislation was adopted (the law of July 6, 1939, n. 1092) which impeded civil registry in larger municipalities for whomever could not demonstrate their possession of a job or appropriate means of subsistence. This “war against the poor” went on to make use of the population registry as an instrument of exclusion even in the first years of the new Italian Republic: the law of 1939 was in fact abrogated only in 1961 in the midst of the economical boom. Certain authoritative assessments made in the 1950s estimated the unlawful presence of circa 250,000–300,000 people from Southern Italy in the northern part the country, or in other words, the presence of persons with no civil registration in that territory. The total number was, however, certainly greater than this, if we consider other important migrations, like that of the Venetians who moved to the “Industrial Triangle”, or the inhabitants of the central-northern part of Italy who lived in Rome. In 1959, during a

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parliamentary debate, the “domestic illegals” were estimated to number about a million (Gallo, 2014, p. 90). In this context, the debate over the new project of legislative reform for the registry which was developed at the beginning of the 1950s came to focus in particular on the new category of “conventional dwelling” that had been inserted into the first draft of the legislation, which aimed at the civil registration of all persons living in Italy without having regularly declared a residency; they were permitted to identify the municipality wherein they had their dwelling, or else a municipality of their choice, as their place of civil registration. This part of the reform was then shelved on account of the critiques raised by the local administrators. A different solution was effectively adopted: law n. 1228, approved in 1954, specified that those who established residency in a given municipality, or those who, though themselves without fixed abode, had established their domicile in that municipality must be enrolled in the same; it also prescribed enrolment for temporarily present individuals. Only several years later, in February 1961, was the law against urbanisation finally abolished in the midst of the economical boom. This occurred more than 13 years after the adoption of the Constitution, whose Art. 16 provides as follows: “Every citizen has the right to reside and travel freely in any part of the country, except for such general limitations as may be established by law for reasons of health or security. No restriction may be imposed for political reasons. Every citizen is free to leave the territory of the republic and return to it, notwithstanding any legal obligations”. The population registry law had decisive importance in the Italian context, in particular, after the abolition of the constraints on domestic mobility. For the first time, the basic principles of the system were established by the law, while the regulation and the instruction provided by the Istat were endowed with an executive and explanatory role (Istat, 1992, p. 12). The overall logic is to provide as wide a coverage as possible for persons who have been displaced, even on a temporary basis, within the territory. Detailed monitoring is the overriding institutional objective. According to the new population registry law, adopted in 1958,4 this supervision takes as its object not only individuals but also the space in which they live. Chapter 7 of the procedural rules5 contains a rather

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detailed set of instructions relative to topographic and ecographic obligations, which mandate the division of the municipal territory into census tracts, the updating and preservation of maps, the development of a topographic plan, the attribution of a clear and visible name to every space of circulation (streets, roads, squares, etc.), the enumeration of every door, gate or paths of access, etc. So, the same logic of location and identification of people is applied to spaces: identifying a building, so as to distinctively distinguish it from others, means locating it within a specific space of circulation and attributing it a number.

4.4 T  he Population Registry between Challenges and Changes: From the Nineties to the Housing Plan The precision of a registry is not followed by equal accuracy on the operative level; indeed, the concrete management of the population registry does not occur in full respect of the architecture designed by the legislator. On the contrary: municipalities often apply the regulation in a selective, if not even distorted, way—to such an extent that the Minister of the Interior is forced many times to intervene through circulars that offer fundamental clarification on the key issues of the registry, in this way assisting the Istat in its role of a supplier of operative regulations. More specifically, the ministerial circulars produced over the course of the years initially tried to rectify the exclusionary attitude of the municipalities. The 1990s were a crucial decade in this regard; first in 19956 and then in 1997,7 the ministry twice moved to sanction the work of those local administrations that illegitimately denied residency. The first circular stated the matter in these terms: it therefore appears contrary to the law and prejudicial to the rights of the citizens, when certain municipal administrations take the attitude of considering requests for civil registration by requesting documentation demonstrating the applicant’s possession of occupational activities on municipal territory, or else the applicant’s access to an abode; or which might require, in the case of married individuals, the simultaneous registration of every

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component of the household, or perhaps an assessment of all the applicant’s criminal records. This attitude seems to re-instate the measures against urbanisation dating back the law of the 6 July 1939, n. 1092, which was repealed with the successive law of 10 February 1961, n. 5.

The reference is clearly to people who do not enjoy a sufficiently high socioeconomic status. Perhaps because they do not have a stable job or because they do not have access to an “appropriate” living space8—or perhaps because they are considered “suspect” and “dangerous” on account of their criminal records. The second circular returns rather to the question of those with criminal records, underlining the illegality of their non-enrolment. In the following years, the circulars did not limit themselves to critiquing the work of the municipalities, but they also clarified and rectified the various rules modifying—or attempting to modify—the population registry law and its related regulations. These rules essentially transpose the exclusionary “experiments” of the local administrations; established municipal practices are translated, at least in part, into rules at the national level. Law 94 of 2009—the second part of the so-called Security Package— had the ambition of radically transforming the architecture of the population registry system, both in terms of registration with respect to the criterion of habitual dwelling and in terms of registration with respect to the criterion of the domicile. More specifically, this legislation tried, on the one hand, to subordinate the population registry to the sanitary conditions of the property, and, on the other, to modify the requirement for registration so far as the domicile criterion is concerned, calling on applicants to demonstrate the effective reality of their domicile, and instituting a registry of all those registered on the basis of this criterion. For the first time since 1961, a national law attempted to change certain extremely delicate aspects of the population registry system. However, with respect to the modifications of the request for registration through the criterion of habitual dwelling, the attempt failed: the draft legislation, which imposed hygienic-sanitary inspections, was rendered less restrictive during the parliamentarian procedure. The regulation that was finally approved was decidedly milder: the hygienic-sanitary inspections were

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not made obligatory, and in any case could not condition civil registration.9 The attempt made by Law 94 was not unprecedented: the Security Package represents the last of a series of strategic actions aimed at establishing an explicit link between the state of the dwelling and the right to residency (Mariani, 2010, p. 93), thus discriminating against those living in “inappropriate” housing—and thus those who belong to social strata which are considered lower from a socioeconomic point of view. At the bottom of some of these actions there lies the idea according to which residency, as regulated by the Civil Code, should be distinguished from merely “civil-registration” residency: this last, unlike the first, would not be conditioned by habitual dwelling alone but also by other elements, such as the conditions of the place of dwelling (ibid., pp. 93–94). Prior to the Safety Package, however, the various attempts to produce a modification to the regulations led to no result, but were kept at the level of public remarks, political proposals or, at most, drafts for legislation. The political initiative of the Security Package was immediately followed by a technical reply on the part of the ministry: a circular10 briefly outlined the introduced modifications without clarifying their limits or highlighting their ambiguities. Substantially, the ministerial statement confirmed the interpretation of the regulation furnished by the legislator who produced it. A second circular11 was issued 4 years later, restating an opinion of the State Council12 and correcting the previous communication by reaffirming the basic principles of the population registry: registration has nothing to do with the condition of the dwelling; the affairs and the interests which must be demonstrated do not presuppose a stable and locatable presence in the municipal territory. As regards, on the other hand, the modification of the requirement for civil registration through the criterion of the domicile, Law n. 94 is more efficacious. The relevance of the voluntary dimension is reduced: the person without fixed abode, “at the moment of the registration request, is required to provide to the registry office all elements necessary to conducting a suitable inspection, toward the end of establishing the existence of his/her domicile”. The Security Package, in other words, introduced

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the obligation of demonstrating the effective reality of the applicant’s domicile. In this way, the legal concept of domicile underwent an important change. The distinction between being without fixed abode and being homeless, as introduced by the Istat, gradually faded: if at the lexical level the first term absorbs the second, at the level of meaning, the second notion substitutes the first (Gargiulo, 2019a). More specifically, the condition of those who live in an itinerant way was no longer considered by the legislator: those leading a mobile existence, who therefore do not put down roots in a single municipality, could no longer freely indicate what municipal territory they consider to be central for their affairs and interests. Parallel to this, those who live in a municipality but without having access to an abode are required to demonstrate their connection with the municipality. The notion of domicile tends to become “material”: the recognition of registered residency, for the category of those without fixed abode (which includes the homeless), now comes to depend on an ever closer relation with the territory, albeit not in an explicit manner.13 In consequence, the elective nature of the condition of the domiciled person tends to lose relevance. There, thus, arose the risk of confusing the figure of the resident with that of the domiciled person, and this gave rise to the idea that whoever registered as a person without fixed abode must demonstrate his/her physical presence. It is no accident that the Istat, the year immediately following that in which the Security Package was adopted, in a new manual on the issue of the registration clarified that: the assessment of domicile is a very different thing from the assessment of residency and does not presupposes the person’s continual physical presence at the indicated address. Therefore the assessment of the official will regard the existence or non-existence of the principal base of the applicant’s affairs and interests and not his/her physical presence, which is and will be, in such cases, an accidental element. (Istat, 2010, p. 71)

Also, in practical terms the manual states that:

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In the case of “homeless” persons, the place of domicile the might coincide with places that involve the juridical sphere of other subjects (for example the portico of a building under which the “homeless” person might habitually spend the night, the bar at which he/she usually eats his/her meals etc.), irrespective, however, of the consensus regarding domicile status on the part of all interested parties. If persons are involved who are assisted by public or private social service agencies (for example the municipality’s social services, religious communities etc.) the domicile of these persons might coincide with the headquarters of the related social service agency. However, nothing prohibits the registration of such persons on a fictional street, like that indicated by Istat, once the places that comprise the applicant’s concrete living area have been identified within the territory of the municipality. (ibid.)

Put briefly, the Istat underlines that these two requisites—the effective reality of the domicile and the habitualness of the dwelling—differ: the first serves to demonstrate that a given municipality is truly central for the affairs and interests of a person, while the second serves to verify that one person is materially present in the indicated living space. The centrality of a territory, in other words, has nothing to do with a person’s physical presence inside of it. In consequence, those who request residency on the basis of their being domiciled, as opposed to those who do so because they have a dwelling, does not need to be locatable at a precise point within the municipal territory, but must only demonstrate the relevance of that point for the applicant’s personal sphere. Law 94, moreover, institutes a Registry of Persons Without Fixed Abode. This is presented as a record-keeping opportunity for the public administration, forming a way of collecting information about people in a position of need, and thus an opportunity to confront, in a more efficacious and efficient way, situations of poverty. The Registry, in other words, is described as a tool which is at once informative and non-repressive, aimed at optimising social measures. Yet, it is established through the Ministry of the Interior, not in any ministry relating to social policies or health. In consequence, its real objectives, beyond its official function, appear evident: to monitor in a selective and discriminatory way the behaviour and

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the movements of the marginal components of the population (Mariani, 2010, p. 90). Some years later, another rule modified the system of registration in a substantial way, by restricting the right to residency. Decree-law n. 47/201414—the so-called Lupi Decree or Housing Plan (Piano casa)— states that “Anyone who abusively occupies a property without entitlement cannot ask residency or insertion in public services in relation to that property” (Art. 5). As a result of this decree, municipalities are empowered to request an additional requirement: whoever declares himself/herself a resident must prove his/her entitlement to occupy the dwelling in which he/she lives. In this case, too, the Ministry of the Interior acted with two circulars intended to scale back the scope of the rule. The first15 clarifies that the objective of the legislator is to allow “restoration of the situation of legality, which has been compromised by the existence of legally relevant facts”. Bearing this in mind, the measure would regard only abusive occupations, namely those that happen against the will of the owner: from a strictly legal point of view, an occupation cannot be considered abusive until the owner of the property—whether public or private—decides to fully and explicitly exercise his/her right to claim ownership, which is as much as to say, until he/she takes executive measures or initiates legal proceedings. The second circular,16 on the other hand, specifies that whoever dwells in abusively occupied property nonetheless has the right to register with the registry office, and, “since the general and prevalent criterion of the ‘habitual place of dwelling’ cannot be applied to whomever lives in abusively occupied property, no solution is possible other than registration ‘by way of domicile’, analogously to what happens with persons without fixed abode”. The measures of the ministry essentially state that not all occupations are abusive: they become abusive only when the owner of the property in question initiates legal proceedings. These measures also clarify that those who abusively occupy a property, while they cannot be registered as habitual dwellers, must be registered as domiciled persons.

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4.5 T  he Registry Office between Critique and Changes: From Minniti to Salvini Some time later, the procedures for civil registration were modified yet again. In the summer of 2015, Legislative decree n. 142 was adopted, which rearranged the so-called reception of asylum seekers into dedicated centres and structures, specifying, among other things, that “the centre or structure represents the [asylum seeker’s] habitual dwelling place so far as civil registration is concerned”. Moreover, fewer than two years after this, the Minniti-Orlando Law intervened in this regulation, introducing Art. 5 bis, which institutes a simplified and accelerated registration procedure. Therefore, without directly touching the population registry law and its relative regulations, the registration process for persons seeking international protection underwent certain modifications. The second Minniti-Orlando Law, Urgent Provisions on the Subject of City Security,17 would then soon touch on another aspect of the population registry question: the effects of the Housing Plan. This regulation establishes that, in presence of minors or persons in need of aid, the mayor can derogate to the prohibitions imposed by Art. 5 in protection of hygienic-sanitary conditions, issuing residency to such persons and allowing their insertion in public services, as well as their participation in the allocation procedures for public residential construction. A year and few months afterwards, a new decree on the subject of security and immigration, later transformed into law, was issued by Matteo Salvini, Minniti’s successor as the head of the Ministry of the Interior. The regulation acts in a restrictive way on the subject of registry, attempting to deny the right of registry to persons who have requested international protection. Specifically, Art. 1318 establishes that “the stay permit of sub-paragraph 1 [for asylum request] does not entitle its holder to civil registry”. The Salvini Law also abolishes Art. 5 bis of Legislative decree 142/2015—introduced by Minniti—thus eliminating the simplified and accelerated registration procedure. Several days following the issuance of this decree, the Ministry of the Interior spread a circular19 clearly confirming the exclusion of asylum seekers from the civil registry: “from the entry into force of these new

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provisions, the stay permit for request of international protection referred to in Art. 4, Sub-Paragraph 1 of the aforementioned Legislative decree n. 142/2015, does not alone justify civil registry”. Two months later, a second communication followed,20 which specified that “asylum seekers— who however will no longer be registered to the residential registry (Art. 13)—will be given first reception structures (CARA and CAS)”.21 The ministerial circulars thus directly give instructions to the prefectures and to the registry offices, instructions which are fully in line with the political will of the ministry. However, the initiative of the minister of the interior immediately occasioned numerous critiques, especially regarding its constitutionality: excluding the right to civil registration for a particular category of persons institutes an unjustified difference of treatment, therefore, violating Art. 3 of the Constitution. The negative evaluations regarding the law on security and immigration soon transformed into political action. At the start of 2019, the mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, ordered the civil registry offices not to apply the decree but to continue to register asylum seekers, and initiated a legal proceeding in the civil court with the end of verifying the decree’s conformity to constitutional provisions.22 Several weeks later, the mayor of Naples, Luigi De Magistris, also raised the question of the relation between the Salvini Law and the Constitution, issuing at the same time a directive addressed to the administrator of the registry office, aimed at mandating the registration of those persons awaiting international protection in the registry of the temporary population.23 In subsequent weeks, opposition to the Salvini Law changed tone: critiques of its unconstitutionality gave way to detailed evaluations regarding the effective contents of the regulation. Legal experts and scholars,24 along with various organisations,25 highlighted the presence of a noteworthy discrepancy between the political intentions and the technico-­ juridical realisation of this regulation. Indeed, leaving aside the will of the “‘historical’ legislator”, this regulation “does not impose any explicit prohibition, but is limited to excluding the possibility that the particular kind of stay permit motivated by the asylum request can be useful documentation for formalising a request for residency; in this way, it modifies the system previously in force” (Consoli & Zorzella, 2019). According to

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this interpretation, the right to civil registration for those seeking international protection is not substantially altered by the action of the legislator: the regularity of the applicant’s presence in Italy would continue to be a necessary and sufficient condition for his/her obtaining recognition of residency, although the applicant cannot demonstrate this presence simply by showing his/her stay permit. Nonetheless, there are other conceivable and practicable routes: “for applicants for international protection, the regularity of their stay is demonstrated less by their stay permit itself—which these applicants might theoretically fail to receive or which they might obtain late, as often happens—than by initiation of the procedure aimed at recognition of the validity of the request for protection, and therefore (leaving aside in this context the applicant’s simple declaration of will) it is demonstrated by their compilation of the so-called ‘model C3’ document, and/or by the identification made at police headquarters on this occasion. One or both documents certify the regularity of the applicant’s stay in Italy, perfectly meeting the conditions indicated by the law for civil registration” (Consoli & Zorzella, 2019). The actions of those mayors contrary to the Salvini Decree therefore concentrated on the continuing existence of the right to residence within the framework of the current legislation: certain local administrators decided to register persons with stay permits that had been granted on account of their request for international protection; these administrators thus disregarded the intentions of the legislator and held, rather, to a reading of the organic sum of provisions within the entire juridical system. One of these mayors, the mayor of Crema, issued a circular which, adopting the arguments noted above, recognised the right to civil registration to those seeking asylum.26 An interpretation of this kind was proposed, on 18 March 2019, by the judge of the Florentine tribunal,27 and was soon followed by many others.28 The Florentine judge—without raising the issue of constitutional legitimacy—admitted the appeal of an asylum seeker with Somalian citizenship to whom the Scandicci municipality had denied residency, offering a constitutionally orientated interpretation of the security decree.29 The sentence reiterated the necessity of acting without regard for the intention of the “historical” legislator, as well as for the successive interpretations of this decree offered by mere administrative circulars.

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Essentially, the judge of the Florentine tribunal reiterated the principle according to which “what must guide us (even public officials, in order to avoid useless appeals and trials on their decisions) in the reading of legislative texts, is in the first place the constitutional context and the system of multilevel protection of rights, and secondly the systematic framework represented by the juridical system. The interpretations furnished by ministerial circulars are relevant only when they are compatible with this framework” (Santoro, 2019). Following the judge’s decision, several mayors, among them the mayors of Vimercate and Bologna, issued documents similar to the circular adopted by the mayor of Crema.30

4.6 S  truggles Over the Meanings of Residency The institution of a civil registry thus follows a rather detailed developmental course: the various modifications to the criteria for registration which have been made or which have been attempted over the course of the years indicate that residency represents a strategic institutional status. The criteria by which residency is recognised represent in consequence elements on which political and institutional agents have tended to focus their attention over the course of the years; they have therefore also been the object of some important changes. Initially, the procedure of civil registration provided for by the population registry law and by its relative regulations, and specified further by the instructions provided by the Istat, were fully consistent with the juridical definition of residency and domicile furnished by the Civil Code. In general, the status of a resident translates into a position within the registry office. For certain categories of people, however, it is the domicile that grants the condition for this registration. Residency, so far as population registry is concerned, can derive therefore from one of two civil conditions: being a resident or being a domiciled person. Put briefly, these represent different starting points but identical outcomes in administrative terms: whether one is registered as one who dwells habitually in a given municipality or whether one is so

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registered through the centrality of this municipality for one’s affairs and interests, civil registration is the same, and produces the same effects in terms of the exercise of rights and access to benefits and services. More specifically, for those who have access to a habitual dwelling, registration is primarily a territorial fact. The Istat, in this regard, expresses itself quite clearly: Both the objective element and the subjective element are necessary to obtain civil registration in the registry of the resident population of a given municipality. However, the subjective element, relative to the will of the citizen, since it has no autonomy of its own, is often absorbed into the objective one. When the declared will of the subject does not correspond to the objective element, the latter will prevail. (Istat, 2010, p. 27)

At the same time, for those possessing only a domicile, registration is based on their will, uncoupled from their presence in the territory. Civil registration, in this case, is not subject to objective confirmation, which is to say the certification of a visible and acceptable living situation, but rather is based on a subjective declaration, namely the applicant’s choice to declare a given spatial area within the municipal perimeters. The place within the territory declared as one’s domicile can be real—for example, the apartment of a relative, one’s own house which one largely leaves empty, or the premises of an association—or it can be virtual, like a fictitious address. As has been seen previously, however, the Security Package of 2009 introduced the obligation, for those requesting civil registration through a domicile, to demonstrate the existence of a bond with the given municipality. In consequence, the territory began to play a central enforcement role, for the status of domiciled persons as well, and this status tended therefore to become “territorialised”. Indeed, in theory, the requirement indicated by the legislation sought by then minister Maroni speaks of effective existence of the domicile, not of the dwelling: this requirement therefore took as its object the existence of an applicant’s interests within a given territory and not his/her presence inside of it. In practice, however, the proof that those seeking civil registration must produce presupposes some kind of rootedness. Usually,

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the social services are involved: some kind of contact with the municipal personnel is held, by many administrations, to be the necessary condition for a person to be considered “effectively domiciled”. Contact of this kind essentially implies the applicant’s presence—if not a stable presence, then at least a temporary one. Yet, contact with social services cannot be considered the only way of demonstrating one’s interests in a given territory. These interests are potentially of such a kind and number as to imply many other kinds of “certification”: to give but a few examples, the presence of a son or daughter living with the applicant’s separated spouse; the presence of a brother or a sister; an association that is occasionally frequented by the applicant but which holds peculiar sentimental value for him/her; and so on. Moreover, the domicile itself represents an interest, and it is not difficult to realise domicile in a given municipality (Minardi, 2005). The Security Package, then, deviously called into question the principal elements of the substance of the residency, the voluntary aspect of the choice of domicile. But at the same time, it brought to light a crucial contradiction in the population registry law. Unlike those without fixed abode,31 the homeless tend to live within a given municipality on a permanent basis. Sometimes, if not often, they are rooted at a specific point within the municipal territory, living in a makeshift shelter. In this sense, therefore, they are more dwellers within this municipality than they are domiciled persons within it. If they are not considered as such by the local institutions, this is on account of their living conditions: living in spaces which are considered inadequate, they are classified as “homeless” despite the fact that they have access to an abode. The precariousness of their dwelling, however, should not be an impediment to the recognition of their habitualness of dwelling. In this regard, the circular we have already noted, that issued by the Ministry of the Interior in 1995,32 clarifies that: the nature of a dwelling, as for example a building without licensed habitability or one which does not obey urban specifications, such as caves, or housing in caravans, shall not be considered an obstacle to civil registration.

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Those who live under a bridge or in a makeshift shelter, in consequence, should be registered as residents, not homeless persons, in that place wherein they concretely live. The substance of local membership has, therefore, been eroded by way of a double action: on the one hand, habitualness of dwelling is not recognised on account of the living conditions of the dwelling; on the other, the status of the person living in a dwelling is reduced to the condition of a domiciled person. The notion of dwelling is thus progressively emptied from the inside: the dignity of habitual residence is denied to many dwelling situations, while the criterion of domicile becomes nullifying where it should not be so, and is applied in an extremely rigid manner (Gargiulo, 2019a). This process of emptying is accelerated by the legislative innovations of the last 10 years. Law 94/2009, as we have already seen, attributes to the municipality the possibility of carrying out an inspection of the hygienic-­ sanitary conditions of the building within which the dwelling is declared. The introduced modification, however, does not obtain its desired aims: the inspection is not obligatory and registration is not subordinate to the positive outcome of such an inspection. As the Ministry of the Interior has declared, verification of the hygienic-sanitary requirements of the abode is optional, and its absence “does not preclude, in principle, the establishment of civil residence in an unsuitable place”.33 Further regulation, however, some years later, produced an important change in the registration system and in the right to residency. The Lupi Decree (or Housing Plan) strongly affected the concept of the dwelling, linking the legal occupation of a living space to the possibility of establishing residence therein. Overall, the combined consequences of the Security Package and of the Housing Plan brought about a scenario in which hygienic-sanitary conditions and legality became pretexts for refusing to recognise in a given place the dignity of a living environment, or for denying that a person effectively resides there. In consequence, a fundamentally important political game has therefore been played around the notion of the dwelling. As the Istat highlighted in the wake of the Security Package of 2009:

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The habitual dwelling still remains the most critical point of the population registry system, the most discussed element, and a source of disputes between citizen and municipality or between different municipalities. One of the major difficulties faced by the registry officer in the correct application of the population registry law is produced by the necessity of having to ensure, before proceeding with civil registration, the existence or non-­ existence of the habitual dwelling of a person—a habitual dwelling that can be deduced through the findings and the evaluations of elements like abode, familial and social relations, school attendance on the part of the applicant’s children etc. (Istat, 2010, p. 27)

A person’s lack of access to a dwelling space with certain characteristics seems to constitute, in the eyes of the municipal administration, the symptom of the absence of those elements capable of qualifying a person as a resident. The very idea of a person not having a house unnerves governments and local administrations, to the point of provoking confusion between the part and the whole: those without access to an “adequate” place in which to live are considered, ipso facto, devoid of any dwelling (Gargiulo, 2019b). The obstacles to civil registration are ambivalent. On the one hand, they provoke a lack of recognition of a person’s presence on the territory, but, on the other hand, they force individuals to have a strict connection with the municipal space: to live there “legally”, in “decent” conditions and in a settled way.

Notes 1. As specified by Art. 12 of Leg. 1228/1954 and by Arts. 52-55 of D.P.R. n. 223/1989. 2. See Regulation (EC) no. 763/2008 of the European Parliament and of the European Counsel of 9 July 2008, relative to the census of population and habitation. 3. Also by a circular from the Ministry of the Interior, no. 1/1997, which clarifies that “for certain particular categories of persons for whom no habitual dwelling can be established, Population Registry Law no. 1228 of 24 December 1954 takes into consideration only one municipality,

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and that is the municipality wherein the domicile of the interested party can be found”. 4. Through D.P.R. n. 136/1958. 5. On these aspects of the question, see Istat (1992, 2010). 6. With circular n.8/1995. 7. With circular n. 2/1997. 8. On the population registry problems regarding persons without any fixed abode in the course of the 1990s, see Kazepov (1997). During this period, there emerged specifically a structural difficulty which would persist over the following decades: many municipalities, violating the clear indications furnished by the Istat, refused to institute a virtual address to which applicants might be registered through the criterion of domicile. 9. Art. 1 of the population registry law was modified by inserting a sub-­ paragraph: “Registration and requests to make registry changes might occasion inspections, carried out by competent municipal officials, regarding the health and hygiene conditions of the property in which the applicant intends to declare his/her residency, in accordance with the sanitary regulations in force”. 10. Circular n. 19/2009. 11. Circular n. 1/2013. 12. Ruling n. 4849/2012. 13. This aspect is confirmed by a circular issued by the Ministry of the Interior a few weeks after the adoption of Law 94/2009, in which it is affirmed that the request to “provide to the registry office all elements necessary to conducting a suitable inspection so as to establish the existence of his/her domicile” is aimed at “avoiding that registration in a domicile might lead to a situation in which the applicant cannot be reached”. 14. Issued on 28 March 2014 and transformed into Law 23 May of the same year. 15. Circular n. 14/2014. 16. Circular n. 633/2015. 17. Law n. 48/2017, which transformed into law Decree-law n. 9320 of the same year. 18. Introducing Sub-Paragraph 1-bis to Art. 4 of Legislative-decree n. 142/2015. 19. Circular n. 15/2018.

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20. Circular n. 83744/2018. 21. On the different forms of reception centres in Italy see Accorinti (2015), Campesi (2017), Colucci (2019), Fabini, Firouzi Tabar and Vianello (2019), and Marchetti (2016). 22. https://www.corriere.it/cronache/19_gennaio_02/palermo-sindacoorlando-disobbedisce-salvini-non-applico-suo-decreto-155631c8-0e7e11e9-81e4-4ae8cf051eb7.shtml. Orlando’s action, as can be seen from this article, was partially anticipated by the local administrators of Bologna, Parma and Turin. 23. The directive can be found at the following address: https://www.meltingpot.org/IMG/pdf/direttiva_sindaco_anagrafe.pdf 24. On this point, see, in particular, Consoli and Zorzella (2019), Morozzo della Rocca (2019), Santoro (2019), and Serra (2019). 25. See the documents produced by ASGI https://www.asgi.it/asilo-eprotezione-internazionale/liscrizione-anagrafica-e-laccesso-ai-serviziterritoriali-dei-richiedenti-asilo-ai-tempi-del-salvinismo/, LasciateCIEntrare https://www.lasciatecientrare.it/liscrizione-anagrafica-dei-richiedentiasilo-dopo-lentrata-in-vigore-del-decreto-salvini/ and Naga https://naga. it/2019/04/06/iscrizione-anagrafica-per-tutti/?fbclid=IwAR0v7576KKFOfihz2ho9ed935WakyYlzCPhPhg-U7quNjFjpKTo4dPSrP8. 26. The text of this circular is available at the following address: https:// www.asgi.it/discriminazioni/iscrizione-anagrafica-richiedenti-asilocrema/. 27. With Ordinance n. 361/2019. 28. A list of sentences favourable to the civil registration of asylum seekers is available at the following address: https://www.avvocatodistrada.it/ materiali/sentenze-e-leggi/richiedenti-asilo-e-residenza-anagrafica/. 29. The text of this sentence is available at the following address: https:// www.asgi.it/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/2019_tribunale_FI_residenza_Asilo.pdf. 30. Some months after the first, a second decree regarding security and immigration was issued: the “Salvini Decree bis”, n. 113/2018, then transformed into Law n. 113/2018. This law, however, does not concern questions relating to population registry. 31. Making use here of the terminology employed by the Istat. 32. Circular n.8/1995. 33. As reads the text of a circular from the Ministry of the Interior. See circular n. 1/2013.

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References Accorinti, M. (2015). Centri di accoglienza: varietà tipologica e dibattito collegato. La rivista delle politiche sociali, 12(2–3), 179–200. Campesi, G. (2017). Chiedere asilo in tempo di crisi. Accoglienza, confinamento e detenzione ai margini d’Europa. In C. Marchetti & B. Pinelli (Eds.), Confini d’Europa. Modelli di controllo e inclusioni informali. Milano: Raffaello Cortina. Colucci, M. (2019). Foreign Immigration to Italy: Crisis and the Transformation of flows. Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 24(3), 427–440. Consoli, D., & Zorzella, N. (2019). L’iscrizione anagrafica e l’accesso ai servizi territoriali dei richiedenti asilo ai tempi del salvinismo. Questione giustizia. Retrieved from http://www.questionegiustizia.it/articolo/l-iscrizioneanagrafica-e-l-accesso-ai-servizi-territoriali-dei-richiedenti-asilo-ai-tempidel-salvinismo_08-01-2019.php. Dinelli, F. (2010). La stagione della residenza: analisi di un istituto giuridico in espansione. Diritto amministrativo, 18(3), 639–708. Fabini, G., Firouzi Tabar, O., & Vianello, F. (2019). Lungo i confini dell’accoglienza. Migranti e territori tra resistenza e dispositivi di controllo. Roma: Manifestolibri. Frascani, P. (1986). Ospedale e società in età liberale. Bologna: Il Mulino. Gallo, S. (2007). Le anagrafi arruolate: l’Istat e le normative contro l’urbanesimo tra Italia fascista e Italia repubblicana. Le Carte e la Storia, 13(1), 175–190. Gallo, S. (2008). Il domicilio di soccorso e altre questioni: spunti per uno studio sulle anagrafi e la mobilità territoriale interna in Italia tra fine Ottocento e fascismo. In E. Sori & A. Treves (Eds.), L’Italia in movimento: due secoli di migrazioni (XIX–XX) (pp. 123–141). Udine: Forum. Gallo, S. (2014). Scontri istituzionali sulle anagrafi. L’Istat e l’abrogazione della legge contro l’urbanesimo (1947–1961). In M. Colucci & S. Gallo (Eds.), L’arte di spostarsi. Rapporto 2014 sulle migrazioni interne in Italia. Roma: Donzelli. Gargiulo, E. (2019a). L’appartenenza negata: la residenza e i suoi significati, tra ambivalenze interpretative e conflitti politici. Diritto, immigrazione e cittadinanza, 20(2), 33–69. Gargiulo, E. (2019b). Appartenenze precarie. La residenza tra inclusione ed esclusione. Torino: Utet.

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Istat. (1992). Anagrafe della popolazione. Legge e regolamento anagrafico (“Annuario statistico italiano”, series B, 29). Roma: Istituto nazionale di statistica. Istat. (2010). Guida alla vigilanza anagrafica. Roma: Istituto nazionale di statistica. Istat. (2014). Censimenti e società. Mutamenti sociodemografici della Sicilia in 150 anni di storia. Roma: Istituto nazionale di statistica. Kazepov, Y. (1997). Senza casa e senza diritti. Le politiche locali contro l’esclusione sociale e abitativa dei senza fissa dimora. In P. Guidicini, G. Pieretti, & M. Bergamaschi (Eds.), Gli esclusi dal territorio. Comunità e politiche di welfare di fronte ai percorsi di impoverimento (pp. 153–190), Milano: FrancoAngeli. Leti, G., Cicchitelli, G., Cortese, A., & Montanari, G. F. (Eds.). (2002). Il campionamento da liste anagrafiche: analisi degli effetti della qualità della base di campionamento sui risultati delle indagini. Research Report for the Presidency of the Council of Ministers. Retrieved from www.governo.it. Marchetti, C. (2016). Le sfide dell’accoglienza. Passato e presente dei sistemi istituzionali di accoglienza per richiedenti asilo e rifugiati in Italia. Meridiana, 86, 121–143. Mariani, F. (2010). Iscrizione anagrafica e domiciliation: un breve confronto tra le istanze di sicurezza italiane e le esigenze di coesione sociale francesi. Diritto, immigrazione e cittadinanza, 12(1), 78–97. Minardi, R. (2005). Senza fissa dimora, senza tetto, senza diritti. I servizi demografici, 2(4), 8–13. Morozzo Della Rocca, P. (2003). Il diritto alla residenza: un confronto tra principi generali, categorie civilistiche e procedure anagrafiche. Il Diritto di famiglia e delle persone, 32(4), 1013–1042. Morozzo Della Rocca, P. (2017). I luoghi della persona e le persone senza luogo (itinerari di diritto civile ed anagrafico). Rimini: Maggioli. Morozzo Della Rocca, P. (2019). Vecchi e nuovi problemi riguardanti la residenza anagrafica nel diritto dell’immigrazione e dell’asilo. Questione giustizia. Retrieved from http://www.questionegiustizia.it/articolo/vecchi-e-nuoviproblemi-riguardanti-la-residenza-anagrafica-nel-diritto-dell-immigrazionee-dell-asilo_16-01-2019.php. OSCE. (2009). Guidelines on Population Registration. Warsaw: Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR).

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Randeraad, N. (1996). I registri di popolazione ottocenteschi come fonti statistiche e strumenti di controllo sociale (Belgio, Italia, Paesi Bassi). Le Carte e la Storia, 22(1), 35–42. Santoro, E. (2019). In direzione ostinata e contraria. Parere sull’iscrizione anagrafica dei richiedenti asilo alla luce del Decreto Salvini. L’altro diritto. Retrieved from http://www.altrodiritto.unifi.it/adirmigranti/parere-decretosalvini.htm. Serra, G. (2019). L’iscrizione anagrafica e i richiedenti asilo dopo il dl 113/2018. Questione giustizia. Retrieved from http://www.questionegiustizia.it/articolo/l-iscrizione-anagrafica-e-i-richiedenti-asilo-dopoil-dl-1132018_25-03-2019.php#_ftnref9.

5 The Functions of Residency

5.1 Residency as a Duty There is a duty corresponding to civil registration, both for persons who are residents in a municipal territory or who identify within it the centre of their affairs and interests, and for local administrations. The first are obliged to declare the habitual dwelling, or, in the absence of this, their domicile in the municipal territory;1 the second are expected to verify the veracity of the declarations produced by applicants and to register all those persons who, though they find themselves in the conditions outlined by the law, have not of their own accord presented themselves in the municipal offices.2 The failure to meet one’s civil registration duties is punishable by fine.3 The duty to declare one’s presence concerns Italian citizens,4 foreigners legally residing in Italy and European citizens. These last, since 2007, have not been obliged to acquire formal authorisation to enter in Italy, but they are required, if they have an intention to stay in Italy for more than three months, to enrol themselves in the registry office according to a differentiated regime: which is to say, they must show that they meet certain requirements, which differ on the basis of the reasons they will be © The Author(s) 2021 E. Gargiulo, Invisible Borders, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53836-1_5

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staying. So far as these persons are concerned, residency effectively replaces the stay permit as a means for controlling the regularity of their presence in Italian territory. The obligation to declare residence fulfils a specific need of the state administration: that of monitoring the local population and determining its composition and movements. Thanks to the civil registries, it is possible to keep track of the persons who are effectively present in a given territory or who have important concerns in the various Italian municipalities by collecting information about their personal, socioeconomic and professional5 characteristics, and about their movements from one municipality to another. The registry office, therefore, represents a strategic means for identification: in the absence of civil registration, individuals become “ghosts” so far as administration is concerned. It is no coincidence, moreover, that the population registry law includes both registration for residents and registration for persons who are temporarily present. The need for documentation and supervision indicated by state apparatuses is translated into a system for identifying in detail all persons and groups connected to the territory. The law defines the system of registration as “systematic collection of the total statuses relative to the single individuals, to the families and to the cohabitations that have established residency in the municipality, as well as the statuses relative to those persons without fixed abode who have established their domicile in the municipality” (Art. 1). For registry purposes, the family6 is composed of “a group of persons connected by the bond of marriage, kinship, affinity, adoption, or legal dependency or else by the affective bonds, living together and having their habitual dwelling in one and the municipality”, even should “group” this be “constituted by a single person alone” (Art. 4). Cohabitation, on the other hand, is defined as “a group of persons commonly dwelling together for reasons of religion, of care or of assistance, or military or penal reasons, or the like, and who have their habitual dwelling in one and the same municipality” (Art. 5). But it can also be constituted, as specified in the Istat’s explanatory notes, by groups “of patients, workers, students, etc.”, which is to say, by “other kinds of cohabitation” (Istat, 1992, p. 44).

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Moreover, all those who declare themselves residents or domiciled persons in a municipality are provided with special forms, related specifically to “individuals, families or cohabitations”, wherein “registry statuses are registered, as derived from the declaration of the interested parties, from the verifications undertaken by the registry office and from the communications of the civil status offices” (Art. 1 of the population registry law). Indeed, the law requires that “each person residing in the municipality an individual document [must] be assigned” (Art. 20), and that the same process must be followed for families (Art. 21) and cohabitations (Art. 22). In the case of the registered family, every component “is responsible for himself/herself and for the persons over whom he/she exercises legal authority […]” and “can also make declarations relative to the change in status of other components of the family” (Art. 6). In the case of registered cohabitation, a “responsible” party is to be identified as a person who plays a leading role. This person, if he/she habitually lives with the rest of the group, is to be considered part of the cohabitation, so long as this does not constitute an independent family (Art. 6). The forms of collective registration, according to a literal reading of the population registry law and its relative regulations, are reserved to the persons with habitual dwelling and denied to domiciled persons (insofar as these are homeless or without fixed abode). The determination of the legislator is nonetheless rather problematic, considering that not only single individuals but also actual family units fall within these two categories: these are sometimes subject to conditions of socioeconomic deprivation or in any case of socioeconomic marginalisation, and at other times, they lack a permanent address for reasons of work or on account of life decisions. In these cases, it is absurd to think that a family document should not be released (Minardi, 2005, p. 12), and it is discriminatory from the political point of view. Registered cohabitation was also a means of registration expressively indicated for asylum seekers. Before Salvini’s law abrogated it, Art. 5 bis of the Legislative-decree 142/2015 read as follows: 1. Those seeking international protection, hosted in those centres described in Article 9, 11 and 14, will be enrolled in the registry office

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of the resident population according to Article 5 of the regulation as decreed by the president of the republic 23 May 1989, n. 223, whenever they are not enrolled individually. 2. It is the obligation of the administrator of this cohabitation to communicate any change therein to the competent registry office within twenty days of the date in which the change occurs. 3. The communication, on the part of the administrator of the registered cohabitation, of the asylum seeker’s waiver of the measures of reception, or of his/her unjustified disappearance, constitutes a motive for his/her cancellation from the registry, without prejudice to his/her right to be registered anew in accordance with Sub-paragraph 1. This article institutes a procedure for special registration—and cancellation—by integrating the provision contained in Legislative-decree 142, whose Art. 5 in Sub-paragraph 3 establishes that “the centre or the [reception] structure represents the place of habitual dwelling for the purpose of civil registration”. By specifying that the person awaiting international protection must be registered according to the criterion of cohabitation, Art. 5 bis “introduced a simplified and accelerated procedure”, without recourse to the declaration of the interested party and the consequent official verifications thereof; it thus made provision for “ex officio registration, based exclusively on the communication of the administrator of the reception structure, for whomever was not yet enrolled in the registry office through the ordinary procedure provided for by Art. 5” and allowed an automatism that occurred “irrespective of the applicant’s having lived three months in a reception centre” (Santoro, 2019). The modification made by the Minniti-Orlando Law also “reinforced the responsibility of the centre’s administrator with respect to any changes in civil registration owing to arrivals or departures, given his/her role as the responsible party for the registered cohabitation”, and it reinforced “the certainty of the centre’s qualification as a place of established dwelling for the purposes of civil registration, with the consequent inadmissibility of postponements and non-compliance on the part above all of those administrative bodies and of municipalities that are hesitant to declare persons already present on their premises to the registry office” (Morozzo della Rocca, 2019, p. 30).

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In consequence to the abolishment of Art. 5 bis, the legislator, regardless of any explicit intentions, “has in some way restored the system of absolute parity between different typologies of foreigners with regular stay permits and Italian citizens, as created by the T.U.I.” (Santoro, 2019). Clearly, from a practical point of view, as well as from a political perspective, it injured the asylum seeker by impeding, in a framework of apparent equality in legal treatment, the adequate treatment of and compensation for those substantial differences that characterise his/her situation.

5.2 Residency as a Right If it is a duty to declare one’s presence in a municipality, to be recognised as resident there is a right, conferred on those who live regularly and “legally” within a given municipal territory. This includes all Italian citizens, European citizens who satisfy the requirements indicated above and all foreigners with regular stay permits.7 Among these last, asylum seekers represent an exception—but this is a controversial fact and is being strongly contested, both on the political and the legal plane.8 Decree n. 113, issued on 4 October 2018 on the initiative of then minister of the interior Matteo Salvini and transformed into law9 on 27 November 2018, indeed establishes that stay permit for motive of international protection request does not constitute a title for civil registration. The same rule also stipulates that access to services offered in the territory must be assured in the place of domicile. Civil registration therefore represents a perfect subjective right and not a simple legitimate interest. The jurisprudence is very clear on this point, underlining how activities connected to civil registration are conditioned ab origine, and are therefore characterised by a power that is not discretionary but is purely verificatory: the control exercised by the public administration “has a merely formal character, and official acknowledgement has a declaratory rather than constitutive nature with respect to the aforementioned right”10 (Milan Tribunal, 2 June 2003, n. 10257). In other words, a person becomes a resident because the municipality names him/her as such, but obtains formal recognition of this fact insofar

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as he/she finds himself/herself in a certain material condition. Residency is therefore a factual state which “ontologically” precedes its juridical declaration; this last represents simply the act through which the local administration establishes de jure the existence of a situation de facto. For this reason, whoever desires civil registration does not present an “application” for, but rather delivers a declaration of, residency or domicile, in this way communicating a factual condition—namely, his/her habitual dwelling in the municipal territory, or his/her locating within it the centre of his/her affairs and interests—whereupon the administration, verifying the effective existence of this situation, must formally acknowledge it. And for this same reason, residency is not “granted” but is recognised to whomever, having the right to it, satisfies the requisites indicated by the law. The right to residency derives from provisions present in the Constitution—whose Art. 16 stipulates that: “Every citizen has the right to reside and travel freely in any part of the country, except for such general limitations as may be established by law for reasons of health or security”—and international law. Art. 13 of the Declaration of Human Rights of The United Nations (1948) affirms that: “Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state”. Art. 2 of the Additional Protocol n. 4 (1963) to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR) states:11 “Everyone lawfully within the territory of a State shall, within that territory, have the right to liberty of movement and freedom to choose his residence”. Similarly, Art. 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights adopted by the general assembly of the United Nations in 196612 provides that “Everyone lawfully within the territory of a State shall, within that territory, have the right to liberty of movement and freedom to choose his residence”.13 Apart from constituting a right in itself, residency is an instrument that allows the transference of other important rights. There is in fact a very tight bond standing between civil registration and certain fundamental freedoms of the person—and not only of the citizen: in the absence of the first, the second risks to remain on paper. Residency is then a “right to exercise other rights”: insofar as it forms the portal of access to services, benefits and assistance, it represents an essential

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channel of communication with the public administration but also of transaction with private subjects. Some rights are linked to civil registration in a formally binding way, while others, though they are theoretically uncoupled from possession of residency, are subordinated de facto, rather than de jure, to civil registration in the municipality wherein they must be exercised.14 Overall, the link between the recognition furnished by the local administration and the possibility of accessing a given service is strengthened not only by law but also by somewhat unclear intermediate regulations and operative orientations of “street-level” bureaucrats.15 The right to social assistance is conditioned by civil registration: the law of reference, 328/2000, entrusts the management of the procedures and services to the municipality, which takes responsibility for the persons enrolled as residents in its territory. The enrolment in the national health service presents a more controversial situation: Art. 19 of the law which instituted it, Law n. 833/1978, stipulates that persons must be registered “in special lists, periodically updated through the local health care unit in the territory wherein they have residency”. The criterion of civil registry is therefore requisite to this process. But it is not so, in theory, for foreign persons: according to the legislation regarding immigration,16 enrolment, in absence of residency, can be carried out in the territory of effective dwelling, which coincides with the domicile indicated on the stay permit.17 If one passes over from the sphere of legislation and circulars to that of the concrete management of these procedures, however, the framework becomes more complex:18 clarity on the enrolment protocol is rather scarce, and changes from territory to territory.19 There seem to be very few civil registry requirements in the field of the right to work. The documentation relative to the communication of employment, to be sent to the Employment Centre, requires domicile alone, as does the documentation relating to compliance with INPS requirements. Residence, on the other hand, is sometimes required for participation in funding programmes, for young persons, relating to civil services, orientation, training and work. Similarly, it is also required in the exercise of a private practice: Art. 35, of the D.P.R. n. 633/1972 requires the indication of address and residency prior to the assignation

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of a VAT number. Although residency is not formally relevant to the execution of paid employment, in practice, this lack of residency is used as a pretext to deny a working contract (Avvocato di strada, 2019). Civil registration is required in various circumstances as a condition for accessing services and measures of active employment policy, especially in connection with foreign persons and, in particular, persons who have requested international protection. This requirement, however, is illegitimate, as is clarified by a circular from the National Agency for Active Employment Policy (ANPAL),20 which establishes that, in the case of asylum seekers, habitual dwelling, even if does not translate into civil registration, is equivalent to residency. The right to vote is closely linked to the civil registration. The Single Text on Laws for the Discipline of the Active Electorate and for the Production and Revision of Electoral Lists21 establishes the institution of civil registration in every municipality. Specifically, Art. 4 identifies in residency the exclusive criterion for enrolment in the municipal electoral constituency. The link between registration and the right to vote interests not only Italian citizens but also European ones—so far as are concerned, obviously, municipal, district and European elections exclusively. Residency also conditions the issuance of the identity card—introduced by the 1931 Single Text on Public Security Laws (Tulps)22 and by the relative Implementation Regulation of 1940.23 Though possession of this document is not mandatory, save in the case of “dangerous” or “suspect” persons, its absence concretely and totally obstructs the execution of numerous interactions with the public administration and with private subjects, also impeding the protection of savings referred to in Art. 47 of the Constitution (Avvocato di strada, 2019). Indeed, banks often refuse to open bank accounts, or to allow access to banking services, to persons who are lacking in residency, and therefore bereft of an identity card. In this regard, a note from the Associazione Bancaria Italiana (ABI, Italian Banking Association) clarifies that the possession of an asylum request stay permit, or of the relative receipt, is in itself sufficient to open a bank account, constituting as it does a valid document of identification, and an alternative to the card released by the municipality.

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5.3 T  he Logic of Registration and Its Implications The registry office answers the administrative need to guarantee as perfect a correspondence as possible between the population de facto and the population de jure, and thus attempts to keep track of the movement of persons, identifying who is actually to be found in the territory, even for short periods of time. For this reason, the registry office aims to be a “lasting and perpetual census, so to speak” (GU 23-1-1865, as quoted in Gallo 2008, p. 126). The reasoning that justifies this institution and determinates its functioning, however, does not result, save in extremely rare cases, in a faithful disclosure of the true dimensions and effective composition of the local society: there is always a rather clear gap between these objectives, on the one hand, and their concrete achievement, on the other. The registry office, in other words, is not a “complete” knowledge-gathering source (ibid.). As is highlighted in an important manual of demography published at the beginning of the sixties—which is to say, shortly before the abolition of the laws against urbanisation—even when the registries are compiled in a rigorous and reliable way, they cannot provide “anything but a measure of changes in residency, which in reality, does not exactly correspond to the final internal migrations […] and still less can they include all internal migrations”; it is therefore necessary to use other kinds of sources, such as “migratory flows of recurrent (daily, weekly, seasonal) character, so as to avoid ‘statistical darkness’” (Federici, 1960, p. 400). The discrepancy between the population de facto and the population de jure is not only due to the inevitable difficulty of detecting all persons present but it is due also to deliberate political choices. As will be seen in Chap. 6, the objectives of the registry office, in spite of the clarity of the functions which they are supposed to execute, are not entirely stable over time, and can vary with the political composition of the government or the regimes in power, which tend to orientate these objectives in accordance with their own desires, sometimes in violation of the formal rules in force in a given moment.

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Under Fascism, which introduced the law against urbanisation, the registry offices were put to the service of a specific demographic policy: they were serviceable to the selection of that part of the population which was considered worthy of civil registration, and who thus received recognition and aid benefits. This policy aimed essentially to increase birth rates (then in decline in urban centres), to regulate rent prices after the post-war downturn and to maintain the public order for the benefit of the middle class (Gallo, 2008, p. 136). A policy of this kind derives from a well-defined vision of Italian society and of its role in the world:24 reflections on the “decline of the West”, the fears linked to the consequences of the demographic transition in other European countries, the myth of demographic numbers as power and as the expression of a flourishing and vital nation are all elements that fall under an organic conception of society (ibid.). The conception of demography held by the Fascist regime fully manifested the ambiguity of the notion of population we analysed in Chap. 1, granting it a nationalistic or even racial interpretation. Biology furnished the metaphor that inspired the reading of community dynamics: if the nation is conceived of as an organism, the interpretation of its demographic data might help to diagnose possible “pathologies” (ibid.) and to improve the race. This kind of organic vision officially disappeared with the end of Fascism, although the laws against urbanisation would remain in force still for a number of years. But more or less visible traces would yet remain of an approach to the population as a living entity to be cured in the medical sense and preserved in the moral one. The language employed by the scientific social disciplines and by the institutions is typical in this regard. Even today, in the publications produced in the field of demographics, just as in the documents and web pages of the Istat, there is talk of “social and migratory movements” whenever reference is made to the physical movement of persons, while the expression “natural movements” is used with reference to the birth rates, mortality rates and marriage rates. On a terminological and semantic level, this language shows a structural confusion and a systematic overlapping between physical and social phenomena. Migratory movements are depicted as mere physical movements, not as movements that are

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dependent on laws and regulations—which, as such, are social and not physical facts—conditioning and limiting human mobility. Likewise, the choice to marry is represented as part of that group of phenomena that have to do with nature, not with society and with the individual freedom of choice. In this way, any consideration on the social construction of human migrations, as well as of marriage and of matrimonial choices, on political conflicts connected to the control of this institution, on the freedom with which one adheres to it and on alternative forms of union, is nipped at the bud, and processes which are the products of negotiation, disputed social signifiers and social conflicts are represented as though they were obvious physiological processes. All analyses and interpretations of social dynamics are thus structured by the vision of population as a stable and well-defined organism, in which deviations from normality,25 as such, are pathological. Language and the categories of civil registration also constitute an interesting matter for observation with regard to the basic guidelines of the agents directly responsible for the design and the management of demographic instruments. The means by which the competent authorities attempt to document the presence of persons within the territory express specific conceptions—conceptions which are mutable in time even if they carry persistent traits—of society and of the way in which it must be regulated. The Istat, summoned by law to provide semantic clarifications and operative directions, once again plays a leading role in delineating an overview of the demographic framework. Interesting interpretations emerge, from the instructions prepared by the institute for the correct interpretation of population registry law, of the concept of the “family”, understood in the registrational sense. This notion was previously based on the concept of “economic bonds”: the bond between the members of the family unit was given by their “pooling the whole or part of their working income or the capital that they earn”, which represented the “constitutive element of the family” (Istat, 1992, p. 43). With the present regulation, on the other hand, it is the dimension of cohabitation which is decisive: for the formation of a unity in terms of civil registration, “it is sufficient that the persons that constitute this unity live together and be linked by bonds of marriage, kinship,

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affinity, adoption, care and also by affective bonds alone”, to such an extent that, so long as they “continue to live together”, there can be no separated family documentation, even should they develop a “distinct economy”, neither by request of the parties concerned nor pursuant to ex officio findings (ibid.). At the same time, cohabitation is a necessary but insufficient condition for the constitution of a registered family: persons can share the same space without being united in an administrative sense whenever their mutual presence does not correspond to an affective link. The explanatory notes to the regulation are clear in this regard: “a person or a family that lives together—in the same apartment—with another person or family can give rise to two distinct registered families if between the components of the two families there are no bonds of the sort indicated in Art. 4” (ibid.). The official motive standing at the basis of the passage from the economic criterion to the affective one is of a practical and operational character: the task of the registry office is to “register persons resident in a given municipality and […] to provide […] information on groups of persons living together and possessing clear bonds, who form ‘registered families’, in accord with the characteristic function of the registry office, namely, to reflect the state of affairs” (ibid.). Considerations of a technical order also influence the choices which are made within rather delicate sectors of the juridical regulation on associated living, such as family law. In this regard, it is interesting to note the way in which the logic of registration, in the name of a full correspondence between the situation de facto and its representation de jure, coincides with the reasoning that governs this field: “for the same reason for which the registry office […] must reflect the real and effective distribution of the residential population within the territory of the various municipalities, spouses who for any reason live separately in different municipalities must be enrolled in the registry office of the municipality in which each of them has his/her habitual dwelling, and this without prejudice to the rights and duties deriving from their marriage as a result of the provisions of the civil code” (Istat, 1992, p. 42). The registry offices, in short, take note of a principle at the basis of civil marriage—the obligation of cohabitation—and adapt themselves to it, without modifying the premises on which the institution of civil registration is founded, but effectively allowing the

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possibility that the members of a married couple might live in different places without ipso facto violating their legal obligations. Beyond the explicit motivations given, the introduced modification seems to break with the organic view by entrusting to individual wills the choice to constitute, or not to constitute, a family unit (in terms of registration). The demonstration of “affective bonds” is indeed wholly free, being as it is “recognised through the declaration that the interested parties make at the moment of their constitution of or entrance into a family”, and is effectively uncoupled from familial bonds understood in biological terms, to the point that even the “domestics, chauffeurs, gardeners and similar figures who live together with the family of their employer” (ibid., pp. 43–44) can form a part of that family, if they wish to: the possibility of an affective bond of the kind subsequently arising, within the context of a relation which is at first exclusively economical, is explicitly recognised. Moreover, the figure of the “head of family”, the one figure with the power to make registry declarations, is abolished. This figure, in the formulation preceding the reform on family law of 1975,26 was exclusively male. Art. 144 of the Civil Code defined it in the following way: “the husband is the head of family; the wife reflects his civil condition, and she is obliged to follow him wherever he sees fit to establish his residency”. The population registry law consistently adhered to these legislative indications, attributing to the male head of the family the exclusive duty of communicating changes in residency: the woman could do this only in case of the certified absence of her husband. It sometimes happened, therefore, that a wife, lacking in the documents demonstrating the absence of her husband, was not permitted to take decisions regarding civil registration27 (Gallo, 2008, pp. 125–126). Following the abolition of the “head of family”, the population registry law substituted this role with that of “person responsible”, that can be filled by any member of the family unit, even a minor if he/she does not live together with persons in their majority (Istat, 1992, p. 44). These changes, which, apart from opposing the sexist tendencies of Italian society, crystallised into juridical regulations that were laboriously modified over the course of the 1970s, seem to smooth out certain classist and paternalist aspects of the previous legislation. The regulation, which

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was subsequently abolished, required that persons living together with a family for whom they carry out activities of domestic service or personal services must enrol in a particular individual form connected to the same registered family, within which they would be identified as “aggregated members” (ibid.). Before the legislative modification, those belonging to these categories were essentially denied any autonomy of decision as regards their own administrative condition: in consequence, they are included in a subordinate way in the families of their employers. Despite this change in the law, paternalism has not yet disappeared from registration practices. Sometimes, it takes on the form of familism: this happens when personal choices affect already constituted familial structures. Individual will, as we have seen, is normally diriment in determining the existence of bonds between the interested parties. In certain conditions, however, it loses its relevance: as specified in Istat’s explanatory notes, “the declaration already given regarding the existence of affective bonds cannot be subject to continuous reconsiderations. The bonds themselves are to be considered terminated only with the end of the cohabitation” (ibid., p. 44). In other words, as in the case of both civil and religious marriages, the registered family, once it has been declared, persists as such, according to institutional provisions, and even counters the will of the persons directly interested, save as they physically separate from one another. The objective fact of living together therefore prevails over the subjective choice of that person who no longer feels himself/ herself to be part of the same family unit. However, as we have already seen, more than a single registered family can live in the same living space. This decision, to not consent subjective choice to prevail over objective facts once the union has been declared, thus seems to be connected less to material facts than to an orientation of values. These are the same values, most likely, that produce another interesting administrative consequence: “those children who marry but continue to live together with their parents do not constitute a registered family of their own” (Istat, 1992, p. 44). Given what is revealed by these legislative choices, the (organic) parent-child relation implies a deeper bond than that perceived by the involved parties, and one which persists in the presence of familial units that could be considerate autonomous, not only because

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they feel themselves to be such—and maybe declare themselves to be such—but also from the perspective of family law itself. Istat’s instructions, hence, show a more general tendency to use registration procedures as devices for carrying out forms of social control. Not so different from the secular and religious registrars analysed by Yuval-­ Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy (2019), the tools and practices described here can be imbued by security aims and permeated by a logic of suspicion. Such an intersection between paternalism and social control is more clearly demonstrated by the way in which the institution of registered cohabitation applies to certain categories of persons. As has already been seen, following the modification made by the Minniti-Orlando Law, civil registration of the asylum seeker tends to be—though this is not mandatory—effected according to this logic, a fact which shows ambivalent aspects. The registry of persons living in a reception centre, not as individuals but as “cohabitants”, leads at once to a simplification of the bureaucratic procedures that must be fulfilled, but also to a conditioning of their autonomous spaces, by subordinating these to the will of the person responsible for the cohabitation, who is usually a social worker.

5.4 The Chain of Command of Registration The system of local membership that has taken form in Italy has a seemingly simple architecture, one which has been structured over more than a century. It was from the first conceived as a centralised structure, but one that allows a wide margin for delegation in all its peripheral parts. The centrality of the rights and duties at play does not permit it to allow decisional autonomy to the local administrations, even if administrative needs induce it to entrust them with organisational and executive tasks. Keeping records on the resident population is one of the functions of demographic services: among these, apart from the institution itself of the registry office, are matters such as citizenship, electoral rights, tracking marital status and statistics. These are function of state jurisdiction— as established by Art. 117 of the Constitution—whose management, however, according to Art. n. 14 of the Single Text on Local Authorities (TUEL), is attributed to the municipalities.

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With regard to demographic services, the Ministry of the Interior has a steering and coordinating function, supporting the prefectures and local administrations. In terms of civil registration, the latter are subordinate to the former: the mayor, the final ring in the “chain of command” that proceeds from the Ministry of the Interior all the way through its territorial articulations, acts as government official and not as head of administration—a role that he plays in other areas. In his/her capacity as representative of the Ministry of the Interior, he/she is called, according to Art. 54 of Law 1228/1954, to faithfully apply the state legislation and to perform duties and directives issuing from the hierarchically higher levels, supervising “first the registry keeping on marital status and population, and second the obligations required of him by the law in electoral matters and matters concerning military conscription and statistics”. The mayor, in his/her capacity as government official, is also registry official. This function can be delegated, in whole or in part, “to the municipal secretary or to other suitable civil servants” (Art. 3), though the title remains his/her own. Art. 2 of the population registry law, moreover, specifies that this delegation can also be conferred to an assessor or, “in case of extraordinary and temporarily limited needs”, to “non-­ municipal employees considered suitable and that have received special training”.28 The registry official—whether the mayor or a delegated member of the local administration—ensures the regular keeping of the registry of the resident population, and he/she is responsible for the execution of all tasks required for its formation and its management (Art. 4). Moreover, “he orders any necessary verifications to determine the truth of the information given by the interested parties, relative to their registry statuses”, “arranges investigations to assess violations of the provisions of the current law and of the provisions regulating its execution”, and “invites persons with registry-related obligations to present themselves in the registry office to provide any information and clarifications necessary for the regular activities of the registry office”. The registry officer is responsible above all for ascertaining that the persons who have bonds with the territory are registered; and, at the same time, he/she is required to proceed with the registration of whomsoever declares himself/herself resident or domiciled person within the registry

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officer’s municipality of competence. In the first case, he/she must verify the existence of the requirement of habitual dwelling, while in the second, he must verify the effective reality of the domicile. Essentially, when a person declares himself/herself resident, or when his/her presence is made known in the municipal territory, the registry offices verify that the declaration is truthful or that the received information is correct: which is to say, that the person in question is really present on the municipal territory in question. At the same time, at the moment in which an individual declares himself/herself to be domiciled, the municipal administration proceeds to ascertain that the municipal space is effectively central to his/her affairs and interests. These verifications are normally—but not necessarily29—conducted by the local police. The responsibility for handling their outcomes, even in case of discrepancies between the version of local police officers and that of municipal civil servants, is in the end the registry office’s. In performing these verifications, a certain margin of discretionary power is recognised to the municipality: whoever carries them out can have recourse to a rather varied set of tools. Habitualness of dwelling is usually ascertained by verifying that the applicant is effectively present in the indicated place. The use of other information, however, is not prohibited, such as consultation with utility companies or the testimony of neighbours. The use of these is permitted so long as these additional elements are considered simply “supplementary information” or “evidence” of the material situation which the verification seeks to assess, and not as the relevant factor in itself—in other words, on the condition that these means do not supplant the direct observation of the person’s effective presence. If the applicant is present in the declared place during the verification procedure, and demonstrates evidence of his/her rootedness, enrolment cannot be automatically denied to him/her simply because— for example—he/she is not actively connected to the gas utility. Such a lack, rather than constituting indication of the fact that the person in question is resident elsewhere, might derive from his/her personal life choices, which remain legitimate however bizarre they may be in the eyes of the registry officer—such as the applicant’s eating only raw food or washing himself/herself with cold water—or they might derive from economic necessity. At the same time, the means by which the verifications

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are carried out must be reasonable and compatible with the applicant’s schedule: to establish a maximum number of verifications, especially if these fall within specific time slots, might be penalising towards persons who, for reasons of work, spend a good part of the day, or even the week, away from home. The effective reality of the domicile, on the other hand, is usually verified through social services: contact with care facilities is considered proof that the requisite has been satisfied. This is, however, a fairly voluntary choice: that a person has relation with these structures is without doubt informative, but it cannot be considered the single determining factor. Not all persons who seek registry through possession of domicile come within the care of the social services. Using Istat’s terminology, it is evident that a person without fixed abode, one who leads an itinerant life, is not ipso facto poor or in need of assistance. It is therefore illogical to suppose that such a person must be in contact with municipal structures. At the same time, a homeless person, even if he/she is potentially—but not necessarily—socioeconomically “vulnerable”, might not make use of municipal welfare, for various reasons. In this case, too, to require that such a person should be cared for on the municipal level means to oblige him/her to adopt a behaviour which he/she does not necessarily wish to adopt, and one which is little congruent with that “centrality of affairs and interests” which constitutes the core of the concept of domicile. Affairs and interests, as has been seen above, are completely internal to a subject’s personal and affective sphere. Their existence, in consequence, is demonstrated by bonds that cannot be reduced to the relation between user and institutions, and that can rather be identified by asking information of the person concerned or consulting other sources: for example, the manager of a café in which the applicant goes to have breakfast, the volunteers of the soup kitchen of a third-sector association, the inhabitants of the street in which he/she sleeps, relatives or friends he/she occasionally visits, and so on. Whenever the registration applicant is not Italian, the registry offices must verify that he/she has a regular stay permit. The kind of verification made by the local administration varies according to the person’s origin. In this matter, the margin of discretionary power left to the municipality is theoretically quite restricted.

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If the applicant belongs to an extra-EU country, the regularity of his/ her stay permit is attested by the formal authorisation granted by the state authorities. Its verification, however, does not necessarily coincide with a requirement that the applicant show his/her stay permit: indeed, this document does not constitute the only element capable of demonstrating the “regularity” of a foreigner’s condition (Morozzo della Rocca, 2003, p.  56). A person with an expired stay permit who is in the process of renewing it is in a condition of “regularity”, even if he/she is at that moment lacking in the usual means of certifying that regularity. At the same time, an immigrant that has submitted an asylum request by compiling a C3 form, but who still has not materially received a stay permit, is “regular”, despite the momentary unavailability of the document that attests to that status. If, on the other hand, the person who declares himself/herself a resident or a domiciled person has citizenship in a member country of the EU, the regularity of his/her stay is demonstrated by his/her satisfaction of the requirements for a period of stay longer than three months. The registry officials must therefore carefully verify these requests, bearing in mind two relevant elements. The existence of these requirements can also be self-certified in the case of EU citizens. Also, the municipal administrations play a merely advisory role with regard to the verification of a person’s “regular” presence in Italy: the power to certify the condition of the “legality” of a EU state’s members is the exclusive prerogative of the prefect. The municipal administration cannot subordinate civil registration to the existence of requirements other than those indicated above. It therefore cannot deny civil registration because the applicant: • has a criminal record; • has been labelled “socially dangerous”; –– does not live in a “building” (residency, as has already been clarified, must be recognised also to persons living in makeshift abodes, such as shacks, caves, caravans, etc.); –– lives in an abode thought to be in poor condition (on account of its habitability, hygiene-sanitary conditions, etc.);

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• lives in a commercial structure registered for commercial and not residential use; • does not have a long-term stay permit (in the case of foreign persons). More specifically, municipalities cannot subordinate the recognition of residency to the material condition of the dwelling place, even following the modifications made by Law n. 94 of 2009 to the population registry law. Despite these changes, the verification of the hygiene-sanitary status of the dwelling is not mandatory and the registration process does not depend on its positive outcome. Municipal administrations, on the other hand, following the issuance of the Lupi Decree, seem to have been granted the power to request clarifications regarding the applicant’s right to occupy the property wherein he/she has declared his/her dwelling. This does not mean, however, that they can demand documents and certificates exceeding the bounds of this requirement, or that this requirement itself may be interpreted in an excessively stringent manner.

5.5 R  esidency between Assistance and Control The registration system in Italy serves to satisfy the various organisational needs of the central state and the local authorities. These needs relate, on the one hand, to knowledge of the territory and of the persons inhabiting it, and, on the other, to the fulfilment of a set of administrative and welfare functions. The monitoring of individuals and spaces is thus married to the offers of public services and welfare. The relation between these two dimensions is however very complex. Historically, to provide aid to persons living in a territory presupposes monitoring them, in the sense of knowing their status, verifying the existence of specific conditions and, often, imposing specific requirements on them. In the case of residency, the authorities identify, through the registry offices, many different kinds of relations between persons and territories,

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relations which possess different spatial and temporal characteristics. This operation has a descriptive aim as well as a performative one: the goal is “to gather”, in an administrative sense, information on the different lifestyles in relation to space, in the double sense of learning of them in their various articulations and of bringing them back within margins that are considered comprehensible. This operation has a material basis when it concerns persons effectively living in a municipality—those who dwell, that is to say, in an apartment, in an outfitted camp, in a cave or a makeshift shelter—who consistently pass their existences in that municipality. In their case, the administrative “capture” permitted by civil registration does nothing other than juridically crystallise a real condition. Here, the descriptive and the prescriptive planes coincide: the situation observed de facto is translated consistently de jure. The same operation has instead a virtual basis when it concerns persons living in an itinerant manner. In their case, civil registration “spatialises” bonds that are not in the strict sense spatial, reducing rootless lifestyles to a territorial basis. In other words, it constitutes the formalisation of a presence which is immaterial, but which it is attempted, in some way, to make concrete. The treatment reserved to persons without fixed abode is typical here: by registering these persons, it becomes possible to “grasp” them, even if they are not physically present in the municipality. Keeping track of them for the purposes of information gathering and of monitoring means registering them within a bureaucratic instrument, which functions as if they were materially localised in the territory, and to such an extent that their belonging to the local society is thereby confirmed. Here, the plane of description is rather distant from the plane of execution: the situation de facto is translated de jure in an incoherent manner. The process of registration, in the end, is less well-defined when it regards persons without a dwelling. In these cases, the act of registration identifies in the territory a presence that is effectively localised in the spatial sense—individuals living within the borders of a municipal area. The absence of a genuine living space, however, precludes the possibility of their presence corresponding to a physical address. Sometimes, this failure is the result of an institutional choice; persistent presence at one

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and the same point of the territory, even when it is accompanied by a person’s living in a shelter which is precarious but which however constitutes a living space, is not recognised as a legitimate form of “dwelling”. For this reason, the solution represented by the virtual address only partially recognises the spatiality of this relation, concealing the lifestyle of the person in question—his way of “living in a place”—behind a fictitious residentiality. When it comes to creating a gap between the material modalities through which individuals live in the territory, on one hand, and the juridical and administrative instruments that are used to formalise these, on the other, the execution of registration can take on coercive characteristics. The history of the governance of the poor is the most extreme representation of the exercise of a power that binds persons to spaces: the obligation that a person must have a permanent dwelling implies the rejection of a wandering and unsettled way of living, and, at the same time, forces individuals to take on a certain kind of attitude, docile and ready to work (Coccoli, 2017). The location of individuals follows a logic of disciplining, which marks the path of contemporary and modern age: It does this first of all on the principle of elementary location or partioning. Each individual has his own place; and each place its individual. Avoid distributions in groups; break up collective dispositions; analyse confused, massive or transient pluralities. Disciplinary space tends to be divided into as many sections as there are bodies or elements to be distributed. One must eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions, the uncontrolled disappearance of individuals, their diffuse circulation, their unusable and dangerous coagulation; it was a tactic of anti-desertion, anti-vagabondage, anti-concentration. Its aim was to establish presences and absences, to know where and how to locate individuals, to set up useful communications, to interrupt others, to be able at each moment to supervise the conduct of each individual, to assess it, to judge it, to calculate its qualities or merits. It was a procedure, therefore, aimed at knowing, mastering and using. Discipline organizes an analytical space. (Foucault, 1991)

The case of asylum seekers hosted in reception centres is typical in this regard. Their mobility tends to be limited: very often, it can take place only in specific areas, at certain hours and in specific conditions. In this

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regard, Art. 5 of Leg.-Dec. 142/2015, which incorporates the directive of the European Parliament and Council n. 2013/33/EU, stipulates that the competent prefect, with a written and reasoned deed, can establish “a place of residence or a geographical area, wherein the asylum seeker can circulate”. This makes for a rather ambiguous duty on the juridical plane, and clearly risks affecting the freedom of movement recognised by various laws, both Italian and international, to foreigners with regular stay permits. Art. n. 7 of the European directive, in this regard, explicitly stipulates that a place of residence can be established only for reason of “public interest, public order or, where necessary, for the rapid handling and the efficacious verification of requests for international protection”. In practice, therefore, the spatial restriction is used as an ambivalent form of control: on one hand, it ties the person to a clearly delimited and monitorable territory; on the other, it subordinates the maintenance of civil registration, and access to aid and essential benefits, to permanent dwelling. If an asylum seeker departs from the reception centre without authorisation, and for a time longer than that allowed, he/she can be denied room and board, the availability of internet connection, non-­ emergency healthcare, legal advice, and so on.30 The declarations that persons are obliged to make to local administrations, albeit in a less evident and more indirect way, exemplify the coercion of persons into permanent dwelling. These are mandatory acts, which communicate the condition of those tied to a given territory, and from them derive various juridical and material consequences. The declaration of residency reserved to those persons habitually dwelling in a municipality obliges them to make their presence in the municipal space visible in an administrative sense by presenting themselves in the necessary offices and clarifying certain personal characteristics. In this case, there is a low level of coercion, in the sense that the interested party limits himself/herself to giving information, but does not need to adopt particular behaviours. In theory, whatever he/she states corresponds to his/her effective condition—his/her habitual dwelling in a living space— which remains unchanged following this communication. The declaration of domicile reserved to persons without fixed abode or to the homeless, on the other hand, officially serves to make known in an

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administrative sense the centrality of a given municipal territory for their affairs and interests, furnishing all necessary elements towards this end. In this case, the level of coercion is decisively higher: while apparently limited to requesting only simple information, behavioural rules are definitely imposed by this process. As we have seen before, many municipalities consider contact with the social services to be the decisive element. If this is to be considered sufficient to give demonstration of domicile, the contact in question must be in some way qualified: that is to say, it must have a certain temporal consistency. Only in this way does the applicant, through the manifestation of his/her “good will”, give proof of “meriting” civil registration. The autonomy of the applicant, who is required by law to simply declare his/her domicile, is relegated to the background in the face of the active role of the social workers. These, moreover, often require proofs of an individual’s presence in municipal territory, which are absolutely not stipulated by the law. In these cases, the space for the discretionary power of the workers tends to broaden. The aims of assistance and those of supervision are in this way closely intertwined. This interlacing, in some cases, is not the consequence of the “technical” action of the workers, but rather of political and administrative choices made by the mayor or by the municipal management. The cases of Milan and Florence are typical in this regard. In the case of the Lombard capital,31 persons without fixed abode are required to document “the existence of a continuous relation with the territory in terms of interests, relations and affects, through a report by a third-sector organisation in charge of the specific case of the beneficiary of this report”. In the model report, indication of the following is stipulated in Sect. 2: “relation with the territory (i.e. references which can establish the applicant’s stay on the territory for at least the last 6 months: services of reference…)”. Put briefly, the municipality asks of those persons who intend to register in the registry office on the basis of domicile a continual and certified presence of the minimum duration of half a year. In this manner, it distorts the logic by which the law and regulations are inspired—the principle of free choice—by demanding a rootedness which is by no means required. In addition, the local administration, by obligatorily involving

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associations of the third sector in the role of guarantors for the applicant’s presence and his/her good will, implicitly denies the autonomy of the latter: whoever wishes to obtain residency cannot interact directly with the public administration. The means of managing this service, therefore, demonstrate—to use the words of Naga, an association which has for years defended migrant rights—“a welfare-centred approach according to which persons without fixed abode must necessarily be considered persons requiring aid and in need of a third-party evaluation regarding their ‘worthiness’ to enjoy one of their rights”.32 In the Tuscan capital as well the proof of the material bond with the territory is considered decisive, and the paternalism is explicit. The executive decision33 which, through an agreement between municipality and associations, modifies the procedures of civil registration in and cancellation from the registry office on the part of persons without fixed abode is very interesting in terms of the language it employs, not to mention the juridical and material consequences that it produces. The text refers continually to the presence, in the city space, of the subject who intends to enrol in the registry office, asking peremptorily that this presence be “continual” and “effective”, and speaks also of “real domicile”. The measure goes so far as to require that, in the case of enrolment in a registry office for one’s having been born in the relative municipality—a status which is considered, within the governing framework, “the last resort” for those who have no bonds whatsoever, not even purely voluntary ones, with the territorial area—civil registration must come through bureaucratic routes dedicated to persons without fixed abode, “without prejudice to the verification process intended to assess the applicant’s effective presence in the territory and the situation of lack of domicile”. Beyond the rules of the game as established by the administration, the procedure effectively employed towards recognition of the residence brings about an almost Kafkaesque system, tortuous and full of snares (Boldrini & Passoni, 2019). There is a very long waiting period for obtaining an appointment at the registry offices—three or four months, on average—while the duration of the total process itself, even when it results in a positive outcome, can extend to as long as eight or nine months, during which the rights of the applicants are “suspended”. Whoever lasts through this exhausting phase then faces the obligation of

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compiling a complicated form containing altogether illegitimate requirements and notices: for example, this form states that the request will be dismissed after 30 days in case of lack of delivery of additional documents. Even for those who manage to reach the terminus of this process, their problems are not at an end: persons without fixed abode who are enrolled in the registry office, if they are to prove their presence, must be present at least once every month at that address corresponding to their registration, under penalty of cancellation if they cannot be found there (ibid.). This kind of cancellation, as clarified in an Istat circular,34 should occur only if the person in question cannot be contacted for at least one full year. The executive measure, on the other hand, stipulates that residency can be revoked after only four months if a person fails to show his/her presence. In the case of those registered on the basis of domicile, moreover, this requirement is completely inappropriate: according to current legislation, these persons, on account of their not habitually dwelling anywhere, do not live in an abode, and are therefore not required to be locatable in any specific place. In contrast with these cases, there are others in which the equilibrium between aid and monitoring is balanced in a very different way. The municipality of Grottaglie (Ta), for example, in 2010 issued a council resolution35 through which, in faithful accord to the Istat’s instructions, it instituted a virtual address for the registration of persons without fixed abode. In establishing the name of the fictitious street, the local administration explicitly tried to avoid discrimination and stigmatisation: rather than opting for a clearly identifying name, like Municipal House Street, the choice fell on Via dei filosofi cinici (Street of the Cynics). The name is dedicated to two citizens of Grottaglie, Ugo and Zzazzà—whose story is told in a note attached to the resolution—who had freely decided to live in the street and to lead the life of “vagabonds”, indifferent to comfort and material goods, precisely like the philosophers to whom the street is dedicated. In addition to choosing terms that do not “brand” the persons connected to it, the Apulian municipality in this way recognises the dignity of a “libertarian” lifestyle—a lifestyle which is not stable and is not rooted in a living space, thus providing broader and more compliant concept of being without fixed abode.

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Notes 1. Art. 2 of Law 1228/1954 states that “it is compulsory for each person to request registration in the registry office of the municipality wherein he/ she habitually dwells, both for himself/herself and for the persons over which he/she exerts parental authority or protection, and to declare to the same office the reasons for his/her change of geographical position”. 2. Art. 4 of Law 1228/1954 establishes that it is the duty of the registry officer to invite “persons with registry-related obligations to present themselves in the registry office, so as to furnish any news and clarification requisite to the regular activities of the aforesaid office”. 3. See Art. 11 of Law 1228/1954, from Art. 56 of D.P.R. 223/89. 4. Certain categories of person form an exception to this obligation. These categories are identified by Art. 8 of the regulation, which specifies the statuses which do not require civil registration: military conscripts or career military personnel, civil servants (including carabinieri, personnel of the state police and the financial police, and drafted military personnel), students attending training and advanced courses at schools, patients at care institutions of every kind—so long as these individuals do not stay in the municipality for more than two years, calculated from the day of their departure from the municipality wherein they are registered—and criminal suspects held in custody. 5. Article 20 of the population registry law states that individual documentation must “indicate gender, date, municipality of birth, civil status, profession, work or craft habitually exercised or professional status, and qualifications, as well as dwelling address”. It moreover allows the insertion of “other information, in addition to that already provided in the documentation itself ” but “only as subject to authorisation from the Ministry of the Interior, in conjunction with the Italian National Institute of Statistics, in accordance with Art. 12 of Law. 24, December 1954, n. 1228”. It also specifies that “the documentation on foreign citizens will also indicate the citizenship and the date of expiration of the stay permit or the issuance or renewal of the stay card”. 6. This means of registration is the object of one of the most important certifications required by Italian law, family status, which certifies the composition of the groups of persons who live together or who are united in terms of civil registration. This is a central notion in relation to the public administration, and in particular regulates access to various

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welfare ­measures, but it is often the subject of misunderstandings. As is clearly specified by the Istat (Istat, 1992, p. 44) family status differs from the family unit, a juridical entity, itself essential for granting access to benefits and services, and necessary for calculating the so-called Indicator of Economic Situation (Isee). While the first is based on the idea of cohabitation together with affective bonds, the second is founded instead on economic dependency, and includes economically sustained persons, even if they do not live with those who sustain them. 7. The Unified Text on Immigration (Legislative  decree n. 286/1998), in Sub-­paragraph 7 of Art. 6, states that “civil registration and variation thereof for foreigners with regular stay permits are made under the same conditions as those of Italian citizens, through the means established by the implementation regulation”. 8. For clear findings of juridical character regarding the initiative of the previous minister of the interior, please refer to the following text, available at https://www.asgi.it/asilo-e-protezione-internazionale/liscrizioneanagrafica-e-laccesso-ai-servizi-territoriali-dei-richiedenti-asilo-aitempi-del-salvinismo/; http://www.questionegiustizia.it/articolo/vecchie-nuovi-problemi-riguardanti-la-residenza-anagrafica-nel-diritto-dellimmigrazione-e-dell-asilo_16-01-2019.php; http://www.altrodiritto. unifi.it/adirmigranti/parere-decreto-salvini.htm#n2. 9. Law n. 113/2018. 10. As is clarified also by the Civil Supreme Court, “The registry system for the resident population […] establishes a juridico-administrative device for documentation and knowledge-gathering, which is organised in the interest both of the public administration, and of single individuals. Indeed, there is an interest not only on the part of the administration to possess a relative degree of certainty regarding the composition and the movement of the population [...], but also on the part of private persons to obtain such registry certification as is necessary to them in the exercise of their civil and political rights, and, in general, in the demonstration of their residency and the family status […]. Moreover, the entire activity of a Registry Officer is controlled […] by a series of limitations, which do not provide any room for arbitrary decisions. It should therefore be a commonly held view […] that controversies on the subject of registration and cancellation in the registry offices of the population, involve situations of subjective right” (Civil Supreme Court, Sect. Un. 19 June 2000. Ord. n. 449). On this point, see also the Civil Supreme Court,

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Sect. II 14 March 1986, Ord. n. 738; Cons. State, Sect. IV 16 January 1990. Sent n. 14. 11. Ratified and made enforceable in Italy with D.P.R. n. 217/1982 on the freedom of circulation. 12. Made enforceable in Italy with Law n. 881/1977. 13. For further information on the right of movement of foreigners in the Italian territory, see Algostino (2001). 14. For further information on the right of movement in the Italian territory, see Avvocato di Strada (2019), Gargiulo and Maiorca (2016), and Ronchetti (2012). 15. For issues related specifically to the difficulty of accessing rights on the part of persons without fixed abode, see Bergamaschi (2017). 16. The Single Text on Immigration, Sub-par. 7 of Art. 4, and its implementing regulation, D.P.R. n. 394/1999, Sub-par. 2 of Art. 42. 17. This would seem to be confirmed by a circular later issued by the Ministry of Health: n. 5/2000. For more information on the more general question of foreign persons to healthcare, see Consito (2017) and Bascherini and Ciervo (2012). 18. As emerges from analysis of the sites of numerous sanitary districts, and from telephone conversations with the operators of some of the same. 19. In some cases, for example, the address indicated on the stay permit is not a sufficient alternative to residency, but it is also necessary to present a declaration of reception. This is a document to be delivered to the authorities of public security, which is to say, to police headquarters, should a person relinquish his/her house or part of it for a certain amount of time, or should he/she host someone. This declaration is compulsory even if it is an Italian citizen who will make use of the building: Art. 12 of the Decree-Law n. 59/78, transformed into Law 191/78, specifies that “anyone who relinquishes his/her ownership or the economic enjoyment of a structure or a part thereof, or who under any other entitlement consents to another person’s exclusive use of the same for a period superior to a month, is obliged to communicate this to the local authorities of public security within 48 hours of the consignment of the structure”. With reference to foreign persons, no temporal threshold is established for the obligation of communication: Art. 7 of the Single Text on Immigration stipulates that “whoever, for any reason, accommodates a foreigner or a stateless person, even be he/she relative or kin, or who transfers to the same his/her ownership or economic enjoyment of real

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estate, rural or urban, within the territory of the state, is required to give written communication, within 48 hours, to the authorities of public security”. Concerning accommodation in the reception facilities, see Art. 109 of the Single Text on Public Security Laws (Tulps). 20. Circular n. 2018 n. 6202. It is curious to note how this communication, though it recognises to the asylum seeker access to active employment policies, cites Art. 11 of Leg.-Dec. n. 150/2015—Provision for the Reorganisation of the Legislation on the Subject of Work Services for Active Employment Policies—in a way that differs partially from the original. The circular reports the following version: “availability of services and measures of active employment policies to all residents on Italian territory, regardless of the region or the autonomous province of reference”. In the original, however, the last word is not “reference” but “residence”. This original formulation is clearly more efficacious than in the version reported in the circular in uncoupling access to services from the residential registry. “Residents on Italian territory” should be understood in a civil sense, not in a registrational sense; otherwise it would not make sense to clarify that this access is granted regardless of the region or the autonomous province of the residency (in this case, the registered residency). 21. Approved with D.P.R. n. 223/1967. 22. Issued towards the R.D.N. 773/1931. 23. Issued towards the R.D.N. 635/1940. 24. In this regard, the regime brought to bear a genuine work of national demographic education, accustoming the Italian to read in all the newspapers hosts of data regarding the births, deaths, and migrations of all kingdom’s cities, advising the prefects to print them in magazines on a weekly basis of not more frequently still (Gallo, 2008, p. 136). 25. For example, a natural decretation, due to the fact the deaths are more numerous of the births, or a drop in marriages. 26. With the adoption of Law n. 151 of 19 May 1975. 27. Gallo report the case of a woman of Fermo who asked to be registered in the registry offices of Milan, the city in which she had resided for about five years with her four children, in the absence of her husband, who was thought to be in the United States: the registry officer denied the registration because the woman could not adopt the role of head of family, given that she lacked official documentation demonstrating the absence of her husband (Gallo, 2008, pp. 125–126).

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28. In case of the mayor’s absence, the function of registry officer is “exercised by the delegated assessor or the senior assessor, and, in the absence of these assessors, by the mayor’s senior advisor”. 29. The duty of carrying these out can also be entrusted to the municipal administrative personnel. 30. A particularly disquieting form of restriction of the freedom of movement—and at the same time, a disquieting form of paternalistic assistance—in which the supervision of time is associated with the supervision of various behaviours, such as limitations on the use of telephones, the obligation to perform gratuitous work and to adopt a grateful attitude and ‘devoted’ attitude, the imposition of language learning—can be found in the Integration Academia of Bergamo, a model reception centre presented as an alternative to the normal CAS (extraordinary reception centres) and promoted by a large segment of the centre-left as an alternative to Salvinism. For further details on this “experiment”, see h t t p s : / / w w w. t p i . i t / m i g r a n t i / a c c a d e m i a - i n t e g r a z i o n e - b e r gamo-20181217218853/ and https://www.lavoroculturale.org/ il-sogno-dellintegrazione-genera-mostri-distopie-democratiche-comealternative-al-salvinismo/. 31. In the framework of a PON, social inclusion project promoted by the municipal administration and assigned to the Ambrosian Caritas, which aims to the counteract the extreme marginalisation and dedicated to persons without fixed abode. 32. The quoted passage is repeated by the letter sent by Naga in Milan to the city administration, to which the reader is referred also for further information on this point, and for other information relative to the project. The text is available at https://naga.it/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/ Lettera-comune-di-milano-residenza-senza-fissa-dimora-DEF.pdf. 33. The D.D.N., 03209/2018. 34. Circular n. 21/1990. 35. Local Council Deliberation n. 433/2010.

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References Algostino, A. (2001). Note sulla titolarità della libertà personale e di circolazione e soggiorno dello straniero extracomunitario. In R.  Bin, G.  Brunelli, A. Pugiotto, & P. Veronesi (Eds.), Stranieri tra i diritti. Trattenimento, accompagnamento coattivo, riserva di giurisdizione (pp. 23–34). Torino: Giappichelli. Avvocato di Strada. (2019). Senza tetto non senza diritti. Rapporto di ricerca su residenza anagrafica e persone senza dimora. Bologna: Associazione Avvocato di Strada Onlus. Bascherini, G., & Ciervo, A. (2012). L’integrazione difficile: il diritto alla salute e all’istruzione degli stranieri nella crisi del welfare state. In R. Nania (Ed.), L’evoluzione costituzionale delle libertà e dei diritti fondamentali. Saggi e casi di studio (pp. 343–383). Torino: Giappichelli. Bergamaschi, M. (2017). Ripensare la città. Senza dimora e intervento sociale. Milano: FrancoAngeli. Boldrini, M., & Passoni, V. (2019). Dalla normativa Nazionale a quella locale: l’accesso alla residenza. In Medici per i Diritti Umani-MEDU (Ed.), Le residenze invisibili. Indagine sulle emergenze abitative a Firenze (pp.  49–62). Firenze: MEDU. Coccoli, L. (2017). Il governo dei poveri all’inizio dell’età moderna. Riforma delle istituzioni assistenziali e dibattiti sulla povertà nell’Europa del Cinquecento. Milano: Jouvence. Consito, M. (2017). Gli stranieri di fronte al diritto alla salute e all’assistenza. In A. Giorgis & M. Losana (Eds.), Diritti uguali per tutti? Gli stranieri e la garanzia dell’uguaglianza formale (pp. 155–180). Milano: FrancoAngeli. Federici, N. (1960). Lezioni di demografia, E. De Santis, Roma. Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. Gallo, S. (2008). Il domicilio di soccorso e altre questioni: spunti per uno studio sulle anagrafi e la mobilità territoriale interna in Italia tra fine Ottocento e fascismo. In E. Sori & A. Treves (Eds.), L’Italia in movimento: due secoli di migrazioni (XIX–XX) (pp. 123–141). Udine: Forum. Gargiulo, E., & Maiorca, A. (2016). Gli stranieri di fronte al diritto di iscrizione anagrafica. In M.  Losana & F.  Pallante (Eds.), Stranieri e discriminazioni (pp. 121–142). Milano: FrancoAngeli. Istat. (1992). Anagrafe della popolazione. Legge e regolamento anagrafico (“Annuario statistico italiano”, series B, 29). Roma: Istituto nazionale di statistica.

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Minardi, R. (2005). Senza fissa dimora, senza tetto, senza diritti. I servizi demografici, 2(4), 8–13. Morozzo Della Rocca, P. (2003). Il diritto alla residenza: un confronto tra principi generali, categorie civilistiche e procedure anagrafiche. Il Diritto di famiglia e delle persone, 32(4), 1013–1042. Morozzo Della Rocca, P. (2019). Vecchi e nuovi problemi riguardanti la residenza anagrafica nel diritto dell’immigrazione e dell’asilo. Questione giustizia. Retrieved from http://www.questionegiustizia.it/articolo/vecchi-e-nuoviproblemi-riguardanti-la-residenza-anagrafica-nel-diritto-dell-immigrazionee-dell-asilo_16-01-2019.php. Ronchetti, L. (2012). L’accesso ai diritti tra regolarità e residenza. In L. Ronchetti (Ed.), I diritti di cittadinanza dei migranti. Il ruolo delle Regioni (pp. 185–194). Milano: Giuffrè. Santoro, E. (2019). In direzione ostinata e contraria. Parere sull’iscrizione anagrafica dei richiedenti asilo alla luce del Decreto Salvini. L’altro diritto. Retrieved from http://www.altrodiritto.unifi.it/adirmigranti/parere-decretosalvini.htm. The United Nations. (1948). Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yuval-Davis, N., Wemyss, G., & Cassidy, K. (2019). Bordering. Cambridge: Polity Press.

6 Administrative Borders

6.1 U  sing Registration to Shape the Local Population Between the legal provisions that regulate the management of the registry offices and their concrete implementation, there often emerges a wide gap, as is evident already from the earliest days of the registry system. The various actors involved in the organisation of the municipal registry offices have interests which are not always convergent. The state, moreover, is not a monolithic entity. Its internal articulations more or less explicitly demand autonomy—even when they are not formally granted it—towards the end of pursuing their objectives. The rules of the game of civil registration thus form the field in which the conflicts and the clashes among institutions take place. The history of the Italian registry system shows how registry offices can perform two different, and incompatible, functions: monitoring, on the one hand, and selective regulation, on the other. These are two different forms of population management: the first aims at detailed knowledge of the municipal space and the persons living within it, while the second aims at recognising those groups considered “acceptable”, and at the same © The Author(s) 2021 E. Gargiulo, Invisible Borders, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53836-1_6

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time at making the remainder administratively invisible. Clearly, the first form is completely legitimate from the point of view of the legal order, and fully answers to the formal purpose for which the registry office was instituted, as well as to its substantial aims. The second, on the other hand, is fully legitimate on the legal plane, although it answers to rather varied political purposes, which enjoy a certain legitimacy exceeding their formal correctness. The proper function of the registry office therefore enters into constant conflict with other purposes—purposes which are spurious, but not irrelevant from the perspective of those institutional actors that so doggedly pursue them. Understanding the nature of these two rationales, then, is an essential prerequisite for understanding what is at stake in  local memberships. The selective choices that cause a mismatch between population de jure and population de facto can arise from calculations relative to the benefits that derive from having a more or less broad municipal community in the registrational sense. In the history of the system of Italian civil registration, the municipal offices have several times been tempted to artificially inflate or underestimate the number of their residents in accord with the objectives of the moment.1 The consequences of these practices, both expected and unforeseen, are not always desirable.

“Inflating” the Population At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the registry system often took as its paramount priority the clean functioning of the municipal machine, and thus concerned itself more with local interests than with the faithful numeric representation of the population (Gallo, 2008, p. 127). Since modification of the number of the members in a municipality produces electoral, financial and welfare consequences of some significance, the poor reliability of the data is often due, not to cultural shortcomings or to insurmountable objective difficulties, but to precise calculations: the “inflation” of the number of residents leads to greater state contributions and favours the acquisition of a number of privileges. In Italy during the great emigration, it was not difficult to turn a blind eye to the obligation

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of cancelling the names of citizens who had emigrated abroad (ibid., p. 128). With the passage of time, this tendency seemed to fade, even if the instrumental reasons for which the population might be “inflated” did not disappear. At present, the counting of residents in the municipal territory is connected to the distribution of many tributes, the waste tax among them. The very survival of a municipality can also depend on the number of registered persons: starting in early 2015, municipalities with fewer than 5000 inhabitants (3000 if they are located in mountainous zones) are obliged to exercise their fundamental function in collaboration with other municipalities: at the same time, there have arisen proposals in recent years on the part of numerous political forces to mandate the amalgamation of municipal institutions in which the population is inferior to a certain threshold. The temptation to represent the local society as being larger and more prosperous than it actually is, is therefore strong: at stake here are not only certain gains for the municipal coffers but the very survival of the institution itself. In situations of this kind, it becomes strategic to try to implement a detailed monitoring of the population. The consequences produced by the failure of persons to register are indeed rather sizeable. Persons residing in a given territory but not registered in its municipal registries are not obliged to pay those taxes that, according to Italian law, they would otherwise be required to pay to the local administration. At the same time, a low number of inhabitants—artificially produced by the “administrative absence” of individuals who are materially located within it—threatens municipal autonomy, if not its actual existence. The failure to formally recognise individuals who form an effective part of the community can therefore provoke losses and damage, both in the fiscal and in the politico-administrative sense. On the contrary, an over-recognition of the same can bring greater economic resources and can augment the prestige of the local institution, if not even save it from disappearing. Yet, more important consequences are involved, if one considers all of this in the light of the proposals for “municipal federalism” and for differentiated autonomy that have been many times presented, or at lest aired, by persons of various positions and political allegiances;

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other consequences include the costs which are frequently “dumped” on the local administrations by the central government. From this perspective, a selective but at the same time loose use of the registry office is easily aimed at the recognition of “desirable” categories of the population: wealthy persons, the possessors of income or assets, might be recognised as residents irrespective of their presence or their affective bonds with the territory in question. In other words, a kind of exchange arises: formal status is given in exchange for prestige and wealth. Initiatives of this kind recall the form of “contractual” citizenship practised at a state level by countries like Cyprus or Malta, where economical investments in programmes of public development and in government bonds, as well as the purchase or the prolonged renting of estates, constitute a route to access naturalisation and, in this way, to access European citizenship and the freedom of circulation within the EU space.

Making the Poor Invisible If the habit of inflating the registries has characterised the history of the Italian registry system since its very beginning, the deliberate choice of not counting certain categories has been equally evident. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a widespread tendency to not enrol persons of low extraction, marginal persons or the recently immigrated. It was precisely that part of society most in need of assistance and protection that suffered the consequences of this tendency. The problem took on national significance between the end of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth, and in particular after 1890, following the entry into force of the Rules on Public Institutions of Assistance and Charity (Gallo, 2008). The new provisions2 introduced the institution of the welfare domicile, which constituted the criterion for determining the distribution of expense relative to the hospitalisation of those indigent persons not belonging to the local administration in which they are cured. Essentially, the costs of hospitalisation were transferred to the municipality in which the patient had most recently dwelt uninterruptedly for five years, or else to that municipality in which he/she was born.

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While, on the one hand, the new welfare rules represented a first recognition of the right to hospital care, on the other, they granted to the registry system an extremely delicate role: that of adjudicating uncertain cases or disputes in the attribution of hospital costs, which were often very onerous, to such an extent that, in some small Italian municipalities, they represented a third of the entire budget. These costs concerned persons who had years ago emigrated into major city centres, but who had intentionally not been registered in the registry offices of the local population (Gallo, 2008, p. 134). The gap standing between the population de jure and the population de facto, then, was due, at least in part, to the decision to limit hospitalisation expenses, even at the cost of failing to register the movement of persons (ibid.). In this period, especially in the great city centres which were inundated by many people from the country, came the consolidation of informal selective practices which were not codified in law, aimed at excluding the poor and marginal component of the population from civil registration, even by suggesting, in some cases, the possibility of putting filters at the city doors (ibid., p.130). The hostility towards the movement of persons belonging to the lower classes seemed to call back into fashion the selective motivations of medieval epochs, based as they were on suspicion of strangers, of the poor and of vagabonds. In 1877, a municipal doctor in Milan, while debating the budget of the Ospedale Maggiore, delivered himself in these terms: “the municipality even proclaims that it is free to welcome that honest man who can, and who knows how to, live off of his own means without infringing on another’s property, and to exclude that man who cannot offer the necessary guarantees” (ibid.). According to Gallo, there is a very close connection between the selective experiments subsequent to the reform of 1890 and the laws against urbanisation issued some decades after. Indeed, with the advent of Fascism, selection became law, incorporating prior inclinations and precedent practices, and exclusion from the civil registry assumed still larger proportions. Lack of gainful employment, in this case, was the official pretext used to exclude persons from registration and to remove persons from the municipality. Through a complex and at times paradoxical mechanism, which obliges employers to hire workers exclusively by means of the employment

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services and the unemployed to enrol themselves through the employment service offices of that district in which they were residents, the individual is closely linked to a specific territory (Gallo, 2007, p. 177). Civil registration, thus, became a necessary prerequisite, first for access to healthcare, and then for registration in the employment lists. At the same time, however, civil registration depended on that form of registration relative to work. A catch-22 thus emerges from which one can only exit by declaring, in accordance with Art. 4 of the law, that one “possesses means of support or exercises duties, jobs, or other economic activity which is not subject to the existing laws on employment placement”: in other words, one can break free only by altogether renouncing this framework and the benefits in terms of social assistance that derive therefrom (Gallo, 2007, p. 180). With the management regime for urban mobility introduced by Fascism, there came a formalisation of the situation in which civil registration was subordinated to the one’s possession of a job. The bans imposed on mobility, however, were frequently ignored. The gap that consequently emerged between the population de facto and the population de jure was even wider than it had been hitherto.

6.2 E  xclusion from Residency in Contemporary Italy The phenomenon of “domestic illegals” formally ceased with the abolition of the laws against urbanisation. The denial of residency continued, however, in other forms, and in a certain sense returned to its origins, namely by moving from the central level to the local one. Not so differently from what happened between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, registry exclusion, at the threshold of the twenty-first century, was directly implemented by the local administrations. Traces of selective projects have been evident since the beginning of the 1990s, as is witnessed by those ministerial circulars which have been remembered on many occasions. A turning point, in this regard, was brought about by the reform of the local institutions,3 which amplified

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the power of the mayor and introduced direct elections. The ambiguity that surrounded the mayoral figure grew ever more pronounced in consequence: politically legitimated by the votes of the local society in fields perceived as being strategic for the interest of the collective—as for instance, the registry office itself—he/she was however supposed to act as a mere executor of state rules. Both informal practices, which had been abundantly experimented with in the past, as well as instruments, themselves not new but reclaimed by the reforms of the early 1990s, were put at the disposition of municipalities: namely, the mayoral ordinances.

Municipal Ordinances as a Power Device The word “ordinance” nowadays denotes a wide and varied set of legal, administrative or judicial instruments that occupy rather diversified positions along the ladder of legal sources without having, in general, the status of genuine laws. Historically, however, ordinances had a different meaning, acting as actual rules. In the first stages of modern age, within a political context characterised by the collapse of the feudal system and the consequent rise of states, these devices were meant as norms issued by kings and territorial authorities, regulating to a large extent the same social phenomena as did medieval law (Kotkas, 2014, p. 89). During the sixteenth century, in German-speaking areas as well as in Sweden, “the law giving (gesetzgebung) of rulers was more akin to ‘execution of norms’ (Normdurchsetzung) than ‘production of norms’ (Normerzeugung)” (ibid., p. 90). The state to be solidified and ruled was still thought as made of estates and hierarchies that laws had the task to safeguard (Mannori & Sordi, 2001, p. 155). Kings, therefore, were conceived more as mere custodians of laws (custos legume), as such committed to ensuring that norms were abided by, than as legal innovators: by means of ordinances, they “sought to strengthen and stabilise the old medieval law” (ibid.). Law, consequently, was perceived as a constraint on political action and not as an instrument of power. But this scenario was destined to change. Police ordinances began to stand in contrast with the medieval law based on customs and traditions (Härter, 1994, p.  640), gradually eroding the old notion of law,

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conceived as something unchangeable and eternal, and paving the way for a modern view according to which law has to be the product of legislative action, that is, positive law (Kotkas, 2014, pp. 8–9). In so doing, the main argument legitimising these tools was the common good (ibid., p. 81), which was in turn understood in many ways. Police ordinances were basically an “empty legislation” that could be filled with many kinds of rationales and contents (ibid., p. 8). Throughout the sixteenth century, devices of limited scope were more common than general ones (ibid., p.  82), and mainly included provisions for subjects—that is, peasants, tradesmen, merchants, the clergy, the nobility and so on—as well as for royal and local authorities, all of them being actors, addressees and objects of “good police” (Kotkas, 2014, p. 83). Police ordinances, as we have seen in Chap. 2, were also used to discipline weak and marginal social groups. In doing their work, however, they modified the general attitude towards those groups, fostering a widespread mistrust and disdain for poor people, who were perceived as idle and lazy (Härter, 1994, p.  655). As such, police ordinances also encouraged “normal” people to work and be active, so as to avoid following the bad example represented by marginal groups (ibid., p. 656). Early modern police ordinances were, therefore, a strategic component of a disciplinary project fulfilled by state authorities. However, they should not simply be seen as orders given from above, but rather “be understood as one of the numerous institutional settings that allowed two-way communication between the central authority and subjects at local level. The fact that the impetus for issuing police ordinances often came from the subjects themselves proves this point” (Kotkas, 2014, p. 175). Police ordinances were conceived, on the one hand, as a way of strengthening royal authority, and, on the other hand, as a strategy “to respond to subjects’ ‘need for security’ in troubled times” (ibid., p. 90). Nowadays, ordinances have generally lost the appellation of “police”, and have turned into something different. In some legal systems, they still have the force of law, or in any case, can be granted legal bearing. Devices of the first kind are present in France, and are employed by the central government, while devices of the second kind are common in United States and in Japan, and the local territorial institutions have recourse to them. In other legal systems, ordinances no longer act as laws,

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being rather administrative provisions or judicial decisions. The Italian system provides for different kinds of ordinances, which derive essentially from two different sources: judges—civil, legal, constitutional and administrative—and the public administration. In the first case, the question regards judicial measures issued to regulate the process’ execution, and these measures therefore do not possess—with certain important exceptions—decisional character. In the second case, behavioural impositions are placed upon single individuals, groups of individuals or structures, and through these duties, both positive or negative, are instituted. In specific circumstances, this imposition can have a general or abstract character, and are constituted as regulatory acts. Normally, however, they take the form of simple measures that give provisions for one or more concrete cases and for one or more specific subjects, and that derogate from the juridical order in force—even if not from its general principles and/or constitutional laws. In this manner, they assume the status of contingent and urgent. The necessary and urgent ordinances, more specifically, present certain distinctive characteristics. The first is that they are without “the force of law” (Cavallo Perin, 2005, p. 785): they qualify as “administrative” precisely insofar as their power “cannot express propositions contrary to the framework of constitutionally protected rights in matters subject to absolute statutory reserve” (ibid.). As is established by a sentence of the Constitutional Court of 27 May 1961,4 these measures must remain within the limits imposed by the law and by the principles of the juridical system; they can intervene only in a provisional way and must refrain from establishing new rules of social behaviour. The second is that their contents must not be determined a priori, but are “defined discretionally, on a case-by-case basis, by the relative administrative authority, in order to provide protection to those interests that the system considers worthy” (Stradella, 2010, p. 103). For this reason, the absence of definition opens the possibility that the central element of the ordinances is, ultimately, the power held by the agency of that public administration which is authorised to issue them (Cavallo Perin, 1990, p. 8). The mayoral ordinances fall within the category of emergency measures: introduced in the Italian juridical system by Royal Decree 148 of 1915, they constitute a kind of broader species of ordinances “of necessity and

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urgency”, which can be issued by monocratic agencies, as a derogation from the legislation in force, in order to provisionally regulate situations which this legislation itself cannot regulate (Stradella, 2010, p.  103). Through the instrument of the ordinance, then, the mayor exerts an extra ordinem power in the local arena, which is founded on the notion of “emergency” (Cardilli, 2009). This power is reiterated by Law 142/1990, which reformed local autonomies, and it attributes to the mayor, in his/her capacity as government official, the task of supervising security and the public order. Specifically, the mayor is granted the power of issuing “necessary and urgent measures in the field of health and hygiene, the construction industry and the local police, toward the end of preventing and eliminating serious dangers that menace the safety of the citizens”; and he/she can in case of need, request from the prefect “the assistance of the public force” for the execution of his/her relative orders. Subsequently, an emergency power of this kind was confirmed by Legislative decree 267/2000, the Single Text on the Laws on the System of Local Authorities (Tuel), which introduced noteworthy innovations as compared to the law of 1990; the most important of these being that represented by Art. 50, entitled “Competences of the Mayor and of the President of the Province”. With this article, the mayor is granted “a sort of direct responsibility with regard to those persons he/she administers in the management of emergencies of a territorially circumscribed character, restricted to certain sectorial areas of intervention” (Stradella, 2010, p. 106). What emerges with the legislative decree of 2000, then, is a system oriented around the principle of vertical subsidiarity, which takes recourse to the intervention of a higher level only when the lower level has proven insufficient, the local authority has defaulted on its responsibilities or the dimensions of the emergency necessitate coordination (ibid., pp. 106–107). The notion of emergency clearly appears in Arts. 50 and 54 of the Tuel: Sub-paragraph 1 of the former establishes that “in case of hygiene-­sanitary emergencies of exclusively local character, the necessary and urgent ordinances [shall be] adopted by the mayor, as representative of the local community”; meanwhile Sub-paragraph 2 of the latter provides that the mayor, as a government official, shall adopt “with due cause, and in

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respect of the general principle of the juridical system, even necessary and urgent measures toward the end of preventing and eliminating serious dangers that menace the safety of the citizens; for the execution of the relatives orders, he/she can ask the prefect, wherever necessary, to aid with the assistance of the security forces”.

A Continuous Emergency The Tuel text, some year after, was modified by Legislative decree n. 92 of 2008,5 Urgent Measure on the Subject of Public Security, which rewrites Art. 54: on the basis of the new version, “the mayor, as government official, adopts, with due cause and in respect of the general principles of the system, necessary and urgent measures toward the end of preventing and eliminating serious dangers that menace public safety and urban security”. The first novelty introduced by the decree issued by Maroni is the introduction of the notion of “urban security”, which would become, in years following, the principle element invoked to justify the issuance of this ordination. This notion is not defined by the law, but rather by a later ministerial decree of 5 August of 2008. In this decree, the “public safety” coincides with “the physical integrity of the population”, while “urban security” corresponds to “a public good to be protected through activities intended to defend, within the framework of the local communities, respect for the rules that regulate civil life, so as to improve the living conditions within the urban centres, civil coexistence and social cohesion”. The second novelty is the introduction of the word “even” before “necessary and urgent”. In this way, the power of an ordinance is extended to situations which are not strictly speaking emergency situations. In consequence, mayors are legitimised in intervening through the instrument of the ordinance without needing to consequently invoke the pretext of alleged emergencies. As a result of this change, ordinances assumed, in an ambiguous way, the status of regulatory acts, becoming in this way instruments productive of genuine rules. In April 2011, however, the Constitutional Court intervened, declaring the law of 2008 illegitimate. According to the Court, the powers given to the mayors by Legislative decree 92, were characterised by an

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“essentially regulatory reach”, since it was possible that a local administrator could “also issue measures of ordinary administration to meet needs relating to safety and urban security”: measures, as such, whose efficacy would not be limited in time. The new ordinances, therefore, tended to constitute rules of permanent character, capable of imposing “prohibitions or obligations on significant behaviours in the religious sphere or in the sphere of ethnic traditions” so as to unduly influence “matters inherent to rights and fundamental freedoms”. The modification of the Tuel, therefore, “designated a true legal source, free in its content and equivalent to the law, in this way violating all the constitutional rules that reserve to legislative assemblies the duty of issuing acts having the force and the value of law (Arts. 23 and 97, as well as Arts. 70, 76, 77, and 117 of the Const.)”, and violating “also the rule of law and the principle of substantial legality in the field of administrative sanctions (Arts. 3, 23, and 97 of the Const.)”. Notwithstanding this decision of the Constitutional Court, the powers of the ordinances, some years later, were once again reinforced. On 20 February 2017 a law decree was issued6—Urgent Provision on the Subject of City Security—signed by ministers Minniti and Orlando that redefined in the first place the notion of urban security, delineating it in terms of “the public good relative to the liveability and decorum of cities” to be protected through a series of actions aimed at the redevelopment and the recovery of the most degraded areas and sites;, the elimination of factors of marginalisation and social exclusion; the prevention of criminality, in particular, of a predatory kind; the promotion of the respect for the law; and the obtainment of higher levels of social cohesion and civil coexistence. Moreover, the rule introduced modifications on the Single Text on Local Authorities, moving in the same direction as the Security Package issued by Maroni in 2008, but trying, at the same time, to avoid the legal critiques brought against the measure produced by the Lega minister (Gargiulo, 2018). More specifically, necessary and urgent ordinances are reformed by this rule. The modification to Art. 50 brings it about that the mayor, as a representative of the local communities, can issue ordinances “in relation to the urgent necessity of taking actions aimed at overcoming situations of serious neglect and degradation of the territory (its environment and

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cultural heritage), or of injury to the general decorum and the quality of urban living, with particular reference to the protection of the peace and repose of the residents”. At the same time, the modification to Art. 54 allows the local administrator, in his/her role as a government official, to use the ordinances to “prevent and counter the rise of criminal or illegal phenomena, such as drug dealing, the exploitation of prostitution, human trafficking, begging through the use of disabled persons or minors”, as well as “phenomena of illegal practices, such as the illegal occupation of public spaces, or of violence, often linked to the abuse of alcohol or the use of drugs”. The most important change, however, does not concern the reformulation of necessary and urgent measures, but the extension of the ordinances’ power beyond the field of the necessary and urgent. Sub-paragraph 7-bis of Art. 50, intentionally introduced with this end in mind, permits the mayor to “order, for a period not exceeding thirty days, with an ordinance neither necessary nor urgent, a limitation on the hours for the selling (including take-away) and administration of alcoholic beverages and spirits”, and to do this “in order to ensure the protection requirements for peace and repose of the residents, as well as of the environment and the cultural heritage in specific and particularly crowded areas of the city, and in relation to the holding of specific events”. The Minniti-Orlando Law once again essentially attributes to the local administrators the power to issue genuine regulatory acts, even if, in this case, they are apparently—and contradictorily—limited in their temporal duration. Leaving aside the legal viability or the constitutionality of the introduced modification, its tendencies seem fairly clear: over the last 10 years, the margin of autonomies granted to mayors has tended to expand, albeit in an ambivalent and formally illegitimate manner. This kind of tendency can be observed even in the daily operations undertaken by mayors, who are frequently engaged in the issuance of “creative” and often exclusionary measures, all of these united, amidst their enormous variety, by the fact that they stand in stark contrast to the ruling state legislation. Leaving aside the strictly legal plane, on a political level, the ordinance power is rather ambiguous and lends itself easily to misunderstandings about the mayor’s role. The articles of the Tuel that define this power refer

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to two possible mayoral “roles”: representative of the local community (Art. 50), on the one hand, and government official (Art. 54), on the other. Under the first, the local administrator acts as an agent directly elected by the municipal population, and therefore enjoys a greater legitimacy, despite the fact that his autonomy is still delimited quite rigidly by state legislations. This means that, beyond the formal limits that should limit his/her possibilities of action, the mayors who refer to Art. 50, still more than those who invoke Art. 54, claim for themselves symbolically, and try to play substantially, the role of central public decision makers. In this way, the possibility of issuing ordinances that are not necessary or urgent—that, albeit in an ambiguous way, take on the appearance of true laws—is equivalent, from their perspective, to the acquisition of a sort of regulatory power.

 xcluding from Residency Through Ordinances E and Other Administrative Tools The instrument of ordinance is widely used also in the field of civil registry. While residency is a subject of state competency, in which the mayor acts exclusively as government official, there is a very acute tendency to regulate registration through the local administrations. Examples of the application of this administrative device date back at least to the end of the 1990s. The ordinances issued by the mayors of Alessandria and Lecco,7 for example, introduced requirements additional to those required by the state legislation: a rent contract, proof of employment, a clean bill of health and the absence of any criminal record (Salvini, 1999). The mayors targeted mainly Italian persons belonging to specific categories: persons without fixed abode, the Romani population, ex-prisoners or the unemployed. Pivoting on an ever more consolidated and formalised power, various local administrators, over the course of the following years, issued ordinances on the subject of residency, with the intention of denying or at least hindering civil registration in certain cases. In November 2007, then mayor of Cittadella (Pd) Massimo Bitonci became the “pioneer” of these initiatives.8 The exponent of the Lega nord was closely followed by

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numerous colleagues who often limited themselves to copying and pasting his measures,9 aided in this also by the regional government.10 In this phase, municipalities of small and medium dimensions are at the centre of the process of exclusion (Gargiulo, 2017). In the great urban centres, the greater technical autonomy with respect to the political directives of the officials and of the registry civil servants makes the will of the mayors translatable less directly in visible and explicit exclusionary actions. It was no accident that the “season of the ordinances” came at the moment in which it did: on 1 January 2007, Bulgaria and Romania entered the European Union; in March of the same year, the above-­ quoted Legislative decree 30 was issued, which regulated the circulation and the stay times of EU citizens, who from that date were no longer obliged to obtain a stay permit, but who were instead subjected to a special registry protocol.11 The Cittadella ordinance followed some month after these events and offered an answer to the fear that they aroused: in the text of the measure it is affirmed that “side by side with the numerous requests for civil registration that are periodically presented, we are witness to a true migratory phenomenon that in objective terms and quantities, save where more specific checks and verifications are implemented, could rise to the level of a true emergency so far as the safeguarding the public health is concerned, not to speak of maintaining the integrity of order and security in the widest meaning of these terms”. The recognition of freedom of movement of European citizens, and in particular in the case of those citizens belonging to most recently admitted states, was not easy for many political actors to digest, both those of the Lega and more in general of the right but also, in some cases, of the centre-left12 (Gargiulo, 2012). The alleged “invasion” of Romanians and Bulgarians was used as a bugbear and was employed as a pretext to try to regulate migrations more generally on the local level.13 Many initiatives aimed at restricting the right to residency thus involved both new EU citizens but also non-Europeans and some categories of Italians. The use of ordinances was further favoured by Law Decree n. 92/2008. Quite predictably, following its issuance, the number of measures, also regarding the subject of residence, greatly increased (Giovannetti, 2012). Ordinances, however, are not the only instruments used here. There are also others which are less “formalised” from a legal point of view.

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Internal circulars, administrative instruments placed rather far down in the hierarchy of the sources of law, are by now rather common—and along with them, and more powerful, are council resolutions, acts of a politico-administrative nature that occupy a position decidedly higher on the same scale. These last are collegial, not monocratic, involving as they do other people in addition to the mayor.14 Exclusionary bureaucratic practices also continue to play a leading role: these have been for more than a century an integral part of the repertoire of municipal actions, and today they appear in renovated and updated forms. The various initiatives on the subject of residency impose the requirement, on those who declare their resident or domicile, of demonstrating the possession of further or more restrictive requirements, beyond those stipulated by the state legislation, altering them sometimes in specious ways, so to make them seem credible. Examples of these requirements include access to a work contract, the possession of a stay permit or of an at least two-year stay permit, an income higher than a certain threshold or the demonstration that the applicant has no active prison or “restrictive freedom” sentences (Guariso, 2012; Lorenzetti, 2009). The requirements introduced or modified by the ordinances can differ in the case of citizens versus non-citizens, or they can be addressed indiscriminately to both. In general, it is above all foreigners, European citizens or Italians manifesting unwelcome behaviours or traits who are excluded—in particular, persons without fixed abode or those living in accommodations which are considered inappropriate, or often persons pertaining to the Romani population. All these initiatives, which often contain openly xenophobic and racist language15 (Borghi, De Leonardis, & Procacci, 2013), practise, or at least threaten to practise, forms of discrimination (Andrisani & Naletto, 2009; Basso & Perocco, 2010; Bontempelli, 2009)—sometimes direct, sometimes indirect or dissimulated—against non-Italians or “undesirable” Italians, and can thus be considered part of a broader ensemble of local policies of exclusion16 (Ambrosini, 2013; Ambrosini & Caneva, 2012). In April 2011, the decision of the Constitutional Court, as we have seen, scaled down the power of ordinances. The intervention of this Court, however, did not put a stop to exclusionary practices. The risk of incurring legal penalties rather forces municipal administrations to seek

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out different strategies and tools. They began to prefer informal practices to the use of ordinances with their direct introduction of additional requirements. The municipalities that insist on the course of administrative measures or of council resolutions begin to work more indirectly by requiring inspections or imposing requirements that apparently have no bearing on civil registration. They are encouraged in this direction by the changes made by the most recent population registry law. The Security Package of 2009 represented an excellent occasion in this regard: as we have seen, this legislation grants to local administrations the faculty of effecting, on the occasion of their verifications of habitual dwelling, a verification also of the hygiene-sanitary conditions of the structure, and it modifies the requirements for the civil registration of persons without fixed abode. Many municipalities, especially in the period preceding the opinion of the State Council and the circulars from the Ministry of the Interior, used the changes hereby introduced as a pretext for denying residency. This time, once again, the mayor of Cittadella was the “pioneer” of the renewed strategies of exclusion, issuing in August 2009 an ordinance which rendered hygiene-sanitary inspections obligatory. As in the past, numerous colleagues followed the road he indicated, through the use of ordinances or circulars. Gavardo’s administration (BS), for example, issued two orders in 2010:17 the first contained a map of the territory that was to be sifted out, accompanied by the list of street and civic numbers on which the verifications were obligatorily to be performed. The municipality of Caravaggio (Bg), for its part, issued two circulars: the first,18 in 2019, repeated the content the Cittadella ordinances; the second,19 in the spring of 2011, obliged registration applicants to provide information relative to their abode: building registry data and data on its dimensions. The aids provided by the central government did not stop with the Security Package of 2009. In the following years, as we have seen in the previous pages and in Chap. 5, the Housing Plan of 2014 provided the municipalities a new pretext to implement exclusionary initiatives. Despite the clarification of the Ministry of the Interior, many municipalities use a specific form, which differentiates between various contexts and contains a greater number of requests as compared to the model form

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included in the first ministerial circular. The form produced by the technicians of the Ministry of the Interior asks the applicant to supply information on the entitlement by which he/she occupies his/her abode, while the form used by the municipal administrations requires the written consent of the structure’s owner and, in some cases, of other persons who are already residents in the apartment. While the first request seems illegitimate, insofar as it does not simply require that the “owner of the house” be informed, but requires rather that he gives his explicit approval in written form, the second seems to be altogether detached from the reasoning of Lupi’s Decree, as it is intended rather to counter overcrowding and, perhaps, the phenomenon of sub-leasing—problems, however, that have nothing to do with recognition of residency. Apart from rhetoric focused on the defence of the owner’s rights and on the maintenance of law and order, the introduction of Art. 5 favoured the development of a true “market of residencies”: the price of an apartment or of a room varies depending on whether the owner of the property, or the tenants who are already residents therein, informally “concede” to the new arrival the possibility of registering in the registry office. More recently, the Salvini Law produced a new opportunity for blazing paths of exclusion from residency. In this case, too, despite ministerial measures, tribunal sentences and the stand—both political and legal— made by of certain mayors (Gargiulo, 2019), the space for discrimination seems to have grown rather large.

6.3 Mechanisms of Exclusion from Residency The forms of local control over registration procedures constitute residency policies: strategies that pivot on the recognition of resident status towards the end of exercising control over the local population, both in its foreign component, and, albeit to a lesser extent, in its Italian component.20 These policies are always illegitimate; whatever strategy is adopted or path chosen by way of applying them, they nonetheless violate the regulations on the subject of registration. Moreover, they are characterised by an excessive degree of discretionary power: the autonomy recognised to mayors and other municipal figures, both political and technical,

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is systematically overused and exploited, although not necessarily always in a conscious way. Residency policies are essentially used to obtain specific aims, employing specific mechanisms which produce various effects. These mechanisms are qualified as direct if they introduce more requirements than those stipulated by the state legislation, and as indirect if they pivot on verification procedures or requirements for documentation that apparently do not concern registration. More specifically, instruments of the first kind require, for the obtainment of municipal residency, submission to specific conditions, while those of the second kind require inspections and/or demand information and documentation that apparently should not jeopardise registration insofar as, officially speaking, they have different objectives than control of registration procedures.21 The direct mechanisms make appearance in the introduction of requirements such as the applicants possessing a certain level of income or a work contract, his/her regularly paying his/her rent, his/her being able to certify a clean bill of health, the absence of criminal records, the appropriateness of his/her dwelling, his/her continual presence in the territory (for persons without fixed abode), and so on. The indirect mechanisms appear instead in verifications and requirements—as for a dwelling’s hygiene-sanitary conditions or its building registration data—that do not officially influence the outcome of a registration application. In addition, mechanisms can be characterised as explicit if they function through the issuance of provisions, measures or formal acts, and as implicit if they rather function through administrative practices, which is to say, by altering or distorting the registration procedures. The use of ordinances, circulars and council resolutions  is an example of mechanisms of the first kind, while face-to-face interactions between the various municipal civil servants involved in the registration process, on the one hand, and applicants, on the other, constitute examples of mechanisms of the second kind (Table 6.1). More specifically, explicit mechanisms have recourse to a varied set of administrative instruments, but can be differentiated on the following grounds: if they are direct, they introduce additional requirements: if they are indirect, they require verifications or documentation. The ordinance of Cittadella of 2007 and the numerous measures that have so

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Table 6.1   Typology of the mechanisms of exclusion from residency Explicit Direct

Formal introduction of new requirements for registration Indirect Prescription of further verifications and/or documentation

Implicit Informal introduction of new requirements for registration Specious use of the results of further verifications

Source: Gargiulo (2014b, 2016)

faithfully mimicked it constitute examples of explicit and direct mechanisms; these introduce “black and white” requirements which are not of a statutory nature. The ordinances issued by Cittadella’s mayor in 2009, and by the mayor of Gavardo in 2010, just as the circulars issued by the municipality of Caravaggio in that same year, can be categorised on the contrary as explicit and indirect mechanisms, which interpret in a distorted way Law n. 94/2009, leveraging on the verification procedures which this law introduced in order to deny residency. Implicit mechanisms, by contrast, assume the appearance of administrative practices but are distinguished from these on the following grounds: if they are direct, they introduce requirements in an informal way before the registration procedure begins; if they are indirect, they instrumentally use, during the process itself, verification procedures and documentation requirements that, officially speaking, have other purposes. The behaviour of those municipal civil servants who recommend that an applicant not submit his/her declaration of residency or of domicile because it does not satisfy certain requirements constitutes an implicit and direct mechanism because it verbally, without written receipt, introduces requirements that are not stipulated by law, thereby preventing the commencement of the registration process. The conduct of the registry officer who denies the existence of a habitual dwelling on account of its hygiene-sanitary conditions—by the reasoning that it is unbelievable that a person should continue to live in an abode in poor condition—represents instead an implicit and indirect mechanism, given that, in the very midst of the registration process, it pivots on elements which are alien to the reasoning behind registry.

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In contrast to explicit mechanisms, implicit mechanisms do not presuppose an intentionally exclusionary will on the part of those who carry them out. Often-repeated discretionary behaviours tend to become routine over time, and thus come to be taken for granted, assuming the status of de facto laws. In these cases, the gap between formal rules and concrete practices tends not to be perceived as such: daily action becomes intrinsically legislative. Moreover, discretionary power can arise from the necessity of facing difficulties linked to professional conditions—lack of resources, organisational inefficiency, excessive pressures, and so on—and not to the presence of evaluations or views of an ethical order (Perna, 2018). In case of civil registration, one can most certainly observe a certain unawareness of—or even ignorance about—the actual contents of the rules: civil servants do not always know the laws and regulations in a detailed manner. In these cases, incorrect and distorted applications of the rules of the game are not necessarily due to an explicitly exclusionary will or to racist conceptions regarding applicants and their behaviour. At the same time, restrictive choices can sometimes arise from the necessity—whether perceived or real—of facing insurmountable obstacles due to the characteristics of the structure within which one is working or of the wider system. Even in these circumstances, discretionary power might not be the consequence of discriminatory intentions.

6.4 Varieties of Residency Refusal When these mechanisms are effective, they can produce various ways for illegitimately refusing the residency. Civil registration can indeed be denied through a formal act, or else in an informal way. Denial can, moreover, be motivated in a clearly illegitimate or in an apparently legitimate way. A formal refusal, carried out through a written notice, is clearly illegitimate when it refers to the failure to meet requirements specified by an ordinance, a circular or a council resolution, while it is apparently legitimate when it claims to be motived by the non-existence of habitual dwelling (but in reality hinges on the pretext of the inappropriateness thereof ) or the irregularity of the applicant’s stay (interpreting the idea of

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“regularity” in too restrictive way). An informal refusal, which is communicated verbally, is clearly illegitimate if the applicant is told to not submit his/her residency declaration on account of a lack of information or documentation required by an ordinance, a circular or a council resolution, while it is apparently legitimate if the applicant is told to not submit the declaration of residency on account of a lack of requirements specified by the law (under too restrictive interpretation of the same). Discretionary power is exercised to varying degrees in these various cases. In the first (upper left in Table 6.2), it is clearly contra legem:22 the reason adduced is a failure to meet requirements which are absolutely not stipulated by the legislation on the subject. The decision which is made, in consequence, leaves evident traces in the registries. This modality, while not frequently used, is however adopted by various municipalities. In the second case (upper right in Table 6.2), discretionary power is characterised as intra legem: the refusal comes with reference, in the written notice, to requirements that, though they are used under false pretexts, are stipulated by the population registry law. The rules of the game are therefore not violated in a clear way, but are rather “distorted from within”. This course does not leave evident administrative traces: by a mere reading of the civil registries, and in the absence of other information, it appears that the local authorities have acted lawfully. In the third case (lower left in Table  6.2), the discretionary power which has been exercised is clearly contra legem: the denial is given verbally and is justified on the basis of the failure to meet requirements which are absolutely not stipulated by the law. This illegitimate action, Table 6.2   Typology of the (illegitimate) modalities of residency denial Formal

Clearly illegitimate

Apparently legitimate

Written notice (failure to meet requirements specified by an illegitimate measure)

Written notice (failure to meet requirements specified by the standing legislation on residency) Informal invitation (on account of the failure to meet requirements specified by the legislation on residency)

Informal Informal invitation (on account of the failure to meet requirements specified by an illegitimate measure) Source: Gargiulo (2016)

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however, leaves no administrative traces: the registration procedures are not even begun and the municipal administration releases no written communication regarding the reasoning for its decision. The applicant leaves the municipal office without having effectively presented his/her declaration of residency23 and without having obtained any receipt indicating what has transpired.24 In the fourth and final case as well (lower right in Table 6.2), just as in the second, the discretionary power used can be characterised as intra legem more than contra legem: the refusal is given verbally but apparently in respect of legal parameters, insofar as it appears from the answers made by the applicant to a series of questions that he/she does not satisfy certain requirements or has not presented all the documentation25 required by the population registry laws. These laws are therefore not violated explicitly but are applied in a restrictive and instrumental way. Once again, the illegitimacy of these events leaves no administrative traces.

6.5 Administrative Discretion in Action The initiatives aimed at excluding certain persons from residency pivot principally on administrative devices and bureaucratic procedures: the only exception is constituted by council resolutions.26 Essentially, technical instruments are here used to realise political objectives, namely to fulfil an operation of population design. Picking and choosing which members of the local population are considered legitimate and acceptable is equivalent to drawing a line between who is inside and who is outside, between us and them. Administrative action constitutes an “encroachment” into an area in which the municipality should faithfully apply the rules established at the state level, performing its decision-making unconnected to any formally decisional role. Violating the population registry law is equivalent to claiming sovereignty over local society: by using the administrative instruments at one’s disposal in an improper manner, municipalities aim to lastingly and structurally regulate, and so to “legislate”, matters over which they have no formal power, behaving in this way like kings over delicate spheres related to social life. This sovereignty, as we will shortly

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see with greater clarity, is sometimes only exhibited—if the measures and the provisions are issued and widely publicised but either not applied or else even withdrawn—while at other times it is concretely exercised— often in hidden, or at least scarcely visible, ways. When the mechanisms are effected directly by the mayor, sometimes in an explicit and ostentatious way, their political content is more directly evident, even if the mayor, formally speaking, acts in his/her quality of government official, and therefore as a “bureaucrat”. When these mechanisms are instead used, in more implicit and less evident ways, by the municipal civil servants and by the local police, their political nature emerges to a lesser extent, but it is always present. The conduct of the municipalities therefore falls within that regulatory universe, sometimes hidden and unknown, which has been efficaciously called infra-law of proximity (Gjergji, 2013, p. 154); this realm plays a crucial role in the contemporary government of migrant and marginal populations, and technical decisions within it take on a strongly political significance (Dubois, 1999; Spire, 2005, 2008). The claim to sovereignty made by the municipal administration produces clear opposition between local powers and state authorities, which involves other institutional actors as well. Among these actors is the magistrature27—which is often called on to intervene in controversies relative to individual cases of denied civil registration—the Ministry of the Interior in its technical role—which attempts to clarify the implications of the various legislative measures—and the Istat—which is responsible for furnishing operative instructions. More specifically, these various institutions act in different ways, as determined by their respective roles and by a variety of conditions. They can take initiative in an autonomous way by producing legislation on the subject; react to the challenges raised by the municipalities or affirm their practices by translating them into general rules; facilitate the application of a rule or attenuate its effects; and clarify operative aspects. In the case of the institutions and of the authorities at a central level, too, the overlap between technique and policy makes an interesting interpretive lens through which to regard these matters. Decrees and laws that modify the population registry law have a clearly political significance: the Security Package of 2009 and the Housing Plan of 2014 are

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exemplary in this regard. The circulars, both ministerial and those issued by the Istat, just as the instructions imparted by the latter, have an apparently technical significance. Yet, they can convey contents and provoke effects of a political kind, albeit in different ways with respect to local measures. The circulars that followed the Lupi Decree represent a rather interesting case from this point of view. The law whose scope they clarify is the fruit of compromises and conflicts in the sphere of the activities of “transversal” government. The majority’s internal tensions, particularly as regards Art. 5—which was strongly desired by persons on the centre-­ right—materialised in the proposal, made by certain exponents of centre-­ left, for amendments meant to alleviate the consequences of exclusion from residency. The proposals were voted down, but, in the months following the approval of the decree and of its transformation into law, the Ministry of the Interior intervened with two circulars that essentially moved in the same direction. In this case, therefore, a technical instrument seems to acquire a political character, not only on account of its contents but also with respect to the input that it generated. The circulars issued in pursuance to Salvini’s Decree and—a few months before that—of the decree relative to the eviction of abusively occupied structures are just as interesting, but in a certain sense for contrary reasons. In this case there is full continuity between the intervention of the Ministry of the Interior and the laws to which they refer, in contrast to what occurred in the case of the Housing Plan. It was actually the ministerial position which marked a break with the law, for it was less critical than it had previously been with regard to the evident changes to the reasoning behind civil registry. In this case, the technical instrument seems to take on a political character, both because it reinforces a law which is itself already rather radical in his objectives and in its potential consequences, and because it reverses the historical tendencies of the Ministry of the Interior on the subject of population registry. The political use of technical instruments thus makes certain decisions more easily attainable and efficacious, which are questionable on the legal plane. In addition, this use shows how, in excluding certain persons from residency, informality assumes a central role, even when informal strategies are not alternative but rather complementary to strategies of a more

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formal kind. Informal refusals can be justified by verbally citing requirements contained within ordinances, circulars and council resolutions. Or they can be based on the “decalogues”28 compiled by various mayors and administrators: that is, collections of clearly illegitimate requirements, delivered informally to the municipal workers and to the local police, or posted on the walls of their offices, and aimed at rendering their behaviour uniform. Formal acts can therefore come to the aid of implicit actions. The same dynamics are verified when the specious verifications regarding dwelling conditions are supported by measures and provisions: in these cases, the explicit intervention of the local administration, which renders these verifications obligatory, paves the way for the launching of mechanisms aimed at demonstrating the lack of habitual dwelling. The relation between formality and informality can also follow other courses, manifesting in the documents and forms relative to registration procedures. These forms, delivered by hand to the applicant or present on the websites of the local administration, play a strategic role. The case of the municipality of Florence, which we analysed earlier, is typical in this regard: incorrect information can exercise a dissuasive influence over people, or it can confuse them, causing them to declare conditions and facts that might affect their civil registration. But it is also true that the forms meant to guide the civil servants in their procedures and verifications can present various problematic aspects. The form prepared by the Istat for the verifications of the local police mandates, for purely statistical reasons, the documentation of a vast and detailed complex of information, relative for instance to the characteristics of dwellings. The information which is recorded, however, is often used instrumentally, and not only by the local police but also by the municipal administrations, which have the last word with regard to the existence of habitual dwellings, and therefore can decide that the requirements have not been met, even if the verification procedure itself produced a positive outcome.29 The interaction between formal acts and implicit actions also brings to light another relevant aspect of these matters: the territorial scale in which the exclusion of the residency takes place conditions its dynamics. In particular, it can change the relations and the equilibrium between the political component and the technical component of the local

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administration. In municipalities of medium and small dimensions, the mayor, even when he acts behind the scenes—issuing “decalogues” rather than ordinances—remains essentially the principal actor, the central agent of exclusion. Given the proximity in which their interactions take place, mayors, registry civil servants and the local police remain in continuous communication: distances tend to lessen, making the administrative personnel more easily subject to the will of their political leadership, even when the person who occupies this position plays, at least formally, the role of a government official rather than a representative of the community. The employees and the managers of the registry offices, even if acting in the capacity of street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 1980)—persons equipped with a certain degree of discretionary power, necessary to their line of work—are in fact not very autonomous. Mayors can, however, transmit their point of view and their instructions in a more or less direct and formal fashion, even at the cost of—as it happens in some cases— withdrawing their delegation from municipal civil servants who show that they are not able to “execute” orders coming “from above”, or revoking the mandate granted to any commander of the local police who is disinclined to support their initiatives (Gargiulo, 2017). In municipalities of large dimensions, on the other hand, the remarkable distance that separates the local administrator and the street-level bureaucrats guarantees the latter—at least potentially—a greater degree of independence. This could translate both into a greater autonomy in respecting the population registry law, even in the face of mayoral pressure, or into a relative freedom to violate the same, despite contrary directives issuing from the political sphere. Even at this scale, however, attempts to impart illegitimate and exclusionary directives from above can be effective. At the same time, choices of the contrary sort are possible—especially following Salvini’s Decree: for example, the choice made by the mayor of Palermo, who retracted his authorisation from the registry office in order to personally and directly enrol persons to whom registration had been denied (Gargiulo, 2019).

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Notes 1. Clearly, apart from local administrations, individuals too can implement calculations and strategies that influence the correspondence between material presence within a population and the formal registration thereof: for fiscal and economic reasons, and sometimes on account of motivations of an affective character, many people avoid declaring themselves resident in the municipality wherein they actually live, or else they manage to register themselves in places—often at the sea or in the mountains—where they have second homes for the holidays. 2. Law n. 6792/1890. 3. Law n. 142/1990 and n. 81/1993. 4. This invalidated Art. 2 of Royal Decree 733 of the 1931 (Single Text on the Public Security Laws), through which ordinance powers were attributed to the prefect in the fields of public order and public security. 5. Transformed into Law. n. 125/2008. 6. Subsequently transformed into Law n. 48 of 2017. 7. Respectively, circular n. 19/1999 and n. 5033/1999. 8. By issuing Ordinance n. 258/2007. After having retired the first ordinances, following a notice of inquiry for usurpation of the public function, an intervention on the part of the Unar and an appeal to the Tar, Bitonci issued a second measure several months later—Ordinance n. 37/2008—through which the requirements of the first were confirmed, and their non-impeding nature with regard to the course of civil registration was underlined again. This second measure also introduced new provisions on the declaration of reception of foreign citizens, so as to discourage residents who intended to make their homes available as a dwelling for foreign persons arriving from abroad. Some years later, in October 2014, Bitonci, this time in the capacity of mayor of Padua, distinguished himself by introducing a new kind of ordinance. Defined by the press as an “anti-Ebola” ordinance, it sought to impede the residence in the municipal territory, even for short periods, of “people lacking in regular identification documents—and in an up-to-date health certificate” and to oblige persons lacking regular stay permits or health cards, identified by the local police, to submit to a health examination within three days at the Asl. 9. For more specific information on the illegitimacy of the contents of the ordinance of Cittadella, and the judicial proceeding that followed its

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i­ ssuance, see Campo (2007) and Paggi (2007). For a socio-juridical analysis of the mechanisms of exclusion put in place by the Bitonci measure, and by the statements contained within it, see Gargiulo (2011). It is interesting to observe how the measures are often widely publicised in newspapers and on local (and national) TV stations, and spread on internet sites of political and para-political organisations, through the pages of Giovani padani, within which the texts of the ordinances and the other measures were made available, so as to favour the “exchange of the practices” between the administrations. 10. Several days following the issuance of the ordinance of Cittadella, a model deliberation appeared on the website of the Veneto Region, presided over at that moment by Giancarlo Gala. This deliberation was clearly inspired by the measure of the Patuan municipality, whose evident objective was to furnish a technical framework, as well as a political cover, to the mayors of the region who intended to intervene in the matter of residency. 11. For more information on the connection between security and residence during the “season of the ordinances” see Gargiulo (2014a). 12. On the “sheriff mayor” of “democratic” extraction, see Tondelli (2009). 13. On this phase of Italian migratory policies, and on the security-centred rhetoric that characterised it, see Colucci (2018), Macioti and Pugliese (2010), and Pastore (2007). 14. A fairly well-articulated list of initiatives of majors in the subject of civil registration, ordered by the kind of legal instrument used, can be found in Lorenzetti (2009). 15. For a general overview of the use of an exclusionary language on the part of the institution, see Faso (2008). 16. For an analysis of the forms of discrimination and exclusion in Italy previous to the issuing of the Security Packages, see Calavita (2005). 17. Circulars n. 50 and n. 166. 18. Circular n. 23335/2009. 19. Circular n. 8900/2011. 20. The expression “residency policies” is used in the vocabulary of local politics to indicate the practices of those mayors who recognise residency to persons who tend to agree with them politically, or on the contrary deny it to those persons who are considered political adversaries (Dinelli, 2010, p. 687).

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21. Usually, and particularly after the issuance of Law 94 of 2009, such verifications and further documentation concern the condition of the dwelling. 22. For a typology of the different forms of discretionary power in relation with the rules that regulate a certain sphere, see Barberis and Buchowicz (2015). For a more general analysis of the forms of arbitrary power, uncoupled from general rules but exercised on a “case by case” basis, see Cuono (2014) and Cuono and Gargiulo (2017). 23. In reality, a refusal of civil registration of the informal kind can also occur in the absence of an actual physical interaction between the applicant and the civil servant—when the person in question, before going in person to the registry offices, calls these offices on the telephone—or it can occur regardless of any interaction between applicant and civil servant—if the person who intends to apply is dissuaded from this course by incorrect or unclear information, or by the alarmist tones found in the pages dedicated to the registration procedures on the site of a given municipal administration. In the past, for example, the municipality of Caravaggio explicitly indicated, in the pages dedicated to its registry services, that “failure to submit the documentation [indicated by the mayor’s circulars] within the required period may result in the applicant’s cancellation from the civil registry”. 24. This modality has particular strategic relevance with respect to the real-­ time entrance in force of residency because—unless the interested party does not deliver his/her declaration of residency electronically, through the postal service or by fax—there arises the possibility that his/her registration might not be made immediately effective. 25. In this respect there is a rather vast number of case studies. A number of examples can be given: the failure of a foreign applicant to demonstrate a stay permit might be invoked in order to discourage him/her, despite the fact that this permit is not the only element demonstrative of the existence of the substantive requirement of the regularity of his/her stay (Morozzo della Rocca, 2003); the incomplete presentation of documentation attesting the existence of the economic requisites on the part of a European citizen, though this attestation can be given—precisely as in the case of Italian citizens—through self-certification; or the inadequacy of the conditions in the abode itself—for example, the fact that it has not yet been furnished, that the gas or electricity utilities have not yet been activated or that power outlets are missing—despite the fact that the

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Ministry of the Interior has many time repeated—as we have already noted—that these conditions should in no way influence the recognition of residency. 26. These instruments, legally classified as acts of a politico-administrative nature, represent a rather interesting choice if they are employed in certain areas, including that of civil registry, insofar as instruments whose use is reserved to the political part of a municipality should indicate the objectives and the programmes to be realised, leaving to the technical part of the municipality the duty of issuing measures suitable their realisation. Those who make use of them, therefore, exercise a legislative power of political nature through improper means: namely, by means of an instrument which, while being in its turn political in purpose, is not political in the effects that it is supposed to produce. The events in the municipality of San Germano vercellese are quite relevant here; in 2017, that municipality issued a council resolution on a subject partially linked to the civil registry. The act in question took as its object the Protection of the Sangermanese Territory from Invasion/Immigration on the Part of the Populations of Africa &co., and it was aimed at hindering citizens from renting out empty houses or farmhouses to cooperatives or institutes that are responsible for the reception asylum seekers, even establishing fines for violators which can run as high as 5000 euros. The public defender of the Piedmont region expressed his opinion on the matter in a letter, in which he points out that, even if the local administration had qualified its initiative as an official guideline, still this initiative in reality seeks to impose obligations and duties, and therefore presents the characteristics of a necessary and urgent ordinance more than of a deliberation. 27. Both ordinary and administrative. 28. These are genuine collections of requirements—all clearly illegitimate— which, according to the local administrators or to the managers, must be required by the civil servants of the registry offices of those who present their declaration to the same. 29. Which, incidentally, can even cause strong friction between mayors and the local police, especially if the latter are not willing to uphold mayoral directives that mandate excessively rigid verification procedures.

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References Ambrosini, M. (2013). ‘We are Against a Multi-ethnic Society’: Policies of Exclusion at the Urban Level in Italy. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36(1), 136–155. Ambrosini, M., & Caneva, E. (2012). Local Policies of Exclusion: The Italian Case. Accept Pluralism Project, Seventh EU Framework Programme, European University Institute. Retrieved from http://cadmus.eui.eu/ handle/1814/22317. Andrisani, G., & Naletto, P. (2009). Cronache di ordinario razzismo. In G.  Naletto (Ed.), Rapporto sul razzismo in Italia (pp.  146–152). Roma: Manifestolibri. Barberis, E., & Buchowicz, I. (2015). Creating Accessibility to Education: The Role of School Staff’s Discretionary Practices. European Education, 47(1), 61–76. Basso, P., & Perocco, F. (2010). Razzismo di stato. Stati Uniti, Europa, Italia. Milano: FrancoAngeli. Bontempelli, S. (2009). “Ordinanza pazza”. I Sindaci e il versante grottesco del razzismo. In G. Naletto (Ed.), Rapporto sul razzismo in Italia (pp. 113–122). Roma: Manifestolibri. Borghi, V., De Leonardis, O., & Procacci, G. (Eds.). (2013). La ragione politica II. I discorsi delle politiche. Napoli: Liguori. Calavita, K. (2005). Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race and Exclusion in Southern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Campo, G. (2007). Cittadella e dintorni. Diritto, Immigrazione e Cittadinanza, 7(4), 63–69. Cardilli, M. (2009). Il potere di ordinanza del Sindaco ex articolo 54 del Decreto Legislativo n. 267/2000 nelle disposizioni modificative del c.d. pacchetto sicurezza. Amministrativ@mente, 1(2), 1–10. Cavallo Perin, R. (1990). Potere di ordinanza e principio di legalità. Le ordinanze amministrative di necessità e urgenza. Milano: Giuffré. Cavallo Perin, R. (2005). Il diritto amministrativo dell’emergenza per fattori esterni all’amministrazione pubblica. Diritto amministrativo, 13(4), 777–841. Colucci, M. (2018). Storia dell’immigrazione straniera in Italia. Dal 1945 ai nostri giorni. Roma: Carocci. Cuono, M. (2014). Decidere caso per caso. Figure del potere arbitrario. Madrid: Marcial Pons.

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Cuono, M., & Gargiulo, E. (2017). Emergenza, crisi, sicurezza. Decisioni extra-­ ordinarie tra governo centrale e amministrazioni locali. Diritto e Questioni pubbliche, 17(2), 15–16. Dinelli, F. (2010). La stagione della residenza: analisi di un istituto giuridico in espansione. Diritto amministrativo, 18(3), 639–708. Dubois, V. (1999). La vie au guichet. Administrer la misère. Paris: Éditions Points. Faso, G. (2008). Lessico del razzismo democratico. Le parole che escludono. Roma: DeriveApprodi. Gallo, S. (2007). Le anagrafi arruolate: l’Istat e le normative contro l’urbanesimo tra Italia fascista e Italia repubblicana. Le Carte e la Storia, 13(1), 175–190. Gallo, S. (2008). Il domicilio di soccorso e altre questioni: spunti per uno studio sulle anagrafi e la mobilità territoriale interna in Italia tra fine Ottocento e fascismo. In E. Sori & A. Treves (Eds.), L’Italia in movimento: due secoli di migrazioni (XIX–XX) (pp. 123–141). Udine: Forum. Gargiulo, E. (2011). Localizzazione dei diritti o localismo dell’appartenenza? Abbozzo di una teoria della residenza. Società Mutamento Politica, II(3), 241–261. Gargiulo, E. (2012). L’emergenza’ dell’esclusione: populismo e controllo locale dell’immigrazione nel contesto italiano. La rivista delle politiche sociali, 9(1), 89–116. Gargiulo, E. (2014a). Produzione di sicurezza a mezzo di insicurezza. Il controllo locale della residenza tra retoriche securitarie e opacità decisionali. Studi sulla questione criminale, 9(1–2), 45–64. Gargiulo, E. (2014b). Una cittadinanza locale frammentata. La residenza tra conflitti e stratificazione civica. Paper for ESPAnet Italy Conference 2014, University of Turin. Gargiulo, E. (2016). La residenza come campo di tensioni. I conflitti sull’iscrizione anagrafica e la loro rilevanza per lo studio delle migrazioni interne. In A. Fornasin & C. Lorenzini (Eds.), Per una storia della popolazione italiana del ‘900 (pp. 171–181). Udine: Forum Editrice. Gargiulo, E. (2017). Ben ordinata, sicura, possibilmente omogenea: visioni della comunità locale in alcuni piccoli e medi comuni italiani. Mondi migranti, 11(1), 77–94. Gargiulo, E. (2018). Una filosofia della sicurezza e dell’ordine. Il governo dell’immigrazione secondo Marco Minniti. Meridiana, 91, 151–173. Gargiulo, E. (2019). I sindaci e l’ “emergenza” immigrazione: dal mantra securitario al protagonismo politico. La rivista delle politiche sociali, 16(2), 43–61.

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Giovannetti, M. (2012). Le ordinanze dei sindaci in materia di sicurezza urbana e l’impatto sui territori. In A. Galdi & F. Pizzetti (Eds.), I sindaci e la sicurezza urbana. Le ordinanze sindacali e i loro effetti (pp. 27–80). Roma: Donzelli. Gjergji, I. (2013). Circolari amministrative e immigrazione. Milano: FrancoAngeli. Guariso, A. (Ed.). (2012). Senza distinzioni. Quattro anni di contrasto alle discriminazioni nel Nord Italia. Milano: Associazione Avvocati Per Niente Onlus. Härter, K. (1994). Disciplinamento sociale e ordinanze di polizia nella prima età moderna. In P. Prodi (Ed.), Disciplina dell’anima, disciplina del corpo e disciplina della società tra medioevo ed età moderna. Bologna: Il Mulino. Kotkas, T. (2014). Royal Police Ordinances in Early Modern Sweden. The Emergence of Voluntaristic Understanding of Law. Leiden: Brill. Lipsky, M. (1980). Street Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Lorenzetti, A. (2009). Il difficile equilibrio fra diritti di libertà e diritto alla sicurezza. In A. Lorenzetti & S. Rossi (Eds.), Le ordinanze sindacali in materia di sicurezza pubblica e sicurezza urbana. Origini, contenuti, limiti (pp. 191–266). Napoli: Jovene. Macioti, M. I., & Pugliese, E. (2010). L’esperienza migratoria. Immigrati e rifugiati in Italia. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Mannori, L., & Sordi, B. (2001). Storia del diritto amministrativo. Roma-­ Bari: Laterza. Morozzo Della Rocca, P. (2003). Il diritto alla residenza: un confronto tra principi generali, categorie civilistiche e procedure anagrafiche. Il Diritto di famiglia e delle persone, 32(4), 1013–1042. Paggi, M. (2007). Il ricorso gerarchico contro l’Ordinanza del Sindaco di Cittadella (PD). Retrieved from http://www.meltingpot.org/articolo11747.html. Pastore, F. (2007). Se un delitto fa tremare l’Italia. Come si affronta una security crisis. Italianieuropei, 7(5), 19–32. Perna, R. (2018). Bound between Care and Control: Institutional Contradictions and Daily Practices of Healthcare for Migrants in an Irregular Situation in Italy. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42(12), 2103–2122. Salvini, N. (1999). Quando la discriminazione viene dai sindaci. Questione giustizia, 18(2), 347–353. Spire, A. (2005). Étrangers à la carte, l’administration de l’immigration en France, 1945–1975. Paris: Grasset. Spire, A. (2008). Accueillir ou reconduire. Enquête sur les guichets de l’immigration. Paris: Raisons d’agir.

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Stradella, E. (2010). Il potere di ordinanza dei sindaci e l’“amministrazione emergenziale”. Rivista trime trale di Scienza dell’Amministrazione, 18(3), 101–121. Tondelli, J. (2009). Sceriffi democratici. La metamorfosi della sinistra. Venezia: Marsilio.

7 Administrative Borders, between Effects and Forms of Resistance

7.1 P  urposes and Targets of the Exclusion from Residency The administrative borders which establish limits on civil registration produce various effects, and take as their objective different categories of persons (Gargiulo, 2017). The status of local citizen is denied, in particular, to non-citizens and to certain marginal groups of citizens. The use of residency as an instrument of selection is a last resort instrument of exclusion, which acts against those individuals who cannot be expelled from the Italian territory—persons without fixed abode or Romani with Italian citizenship—or else individuals who are not easily expelled—European citizens and foreigners with regular stay permits. It is thus not the “lowest” individuals on the ladder of civil stratification—which is to say, irregular non-citizens (who are excluded a priori because they the do not have the right to civil registration)—but rather the “penultimate” individuals who are the object of legal discrimination: namely those who have a right to stay or to residency but who find themselves, or easily risk finding themselves, in conditions of economic marginalisation. In other words, these are individuals who, though have superseded a long obstacle course, © The Author(s) 2021 E. Gargiulo, Invisible Borders, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53836-1_7

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and have succeeded in guaranteeing to themselves and to their families a status of “legality”, risk finding their situations weakened (Gargiulo, 2016). In many cases, these are unwanted, if “useful”, individuals: which is to say, persons to whom formal recognition has been denied, though they are spatially present within the municipal territory and, very often, are substantially included—albeit in a subordinate position—in the economic or productive tissue of the municipality. The mechanisms of exclusion from civil registration, moreover, take various aims. Above all when they employ formal instruments and are highly visible, they can have an exclusively propagandistic intent: those who promote them are interested in attracting media attention and reassuring the citizens (Ambrosini, 2013), rather than in materially pursuing exclusionary objectives. In other cases, they can express the will to keep in line with their relative administrations: numerous “copy-paste” provisions exclusively follow the logic of imitation; they are, that is to say, aimed at avoiding possible criticisms from the local population, who are prepared to reprove the mayor for having been less resolute than his/her colleagues in confronting presumed “immigration emergencies”. In these cases, the objective of (merely threatened) strategies of exclusion is of a politico-electoral kind. This does not mean, however, that the effects cannot become real. The simple fact that certain measures have been announced might concretely contribute to producing some kind of separation. To trace a border, moreover, it is not always necessary to etch a mark or a groove; sometimes, “it is enough to name it, to say it” (Cella, 2006, p. 206), supposing only that it is authorised individuals, individuals on whom a specific authority in these matters has been conferred, who do so. Ordinances, circulars and council resolutions, insofar as they are issued by persons to whom political legitimacy is recognised—even when these persons actually act beyond legal limits—can produce performative effects on the social reality even when they remain unactualised by spreading visions containing, more or less implicitly, negative categorisations regarding certain groups. For this reason, the discourses (Jäger, 2001; Van Dijk, 1997; Weiss & Wodak, 2003) with which these provisions are constructed become fundamental: through them, local administrators exercise and justify the power of appointment.

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Even when they remain on paper, however, these measures foment distinctions of symbolic nature, tracing a very clear line which, at the local level, divides “desirable” persons from “undesirable” persons, thereby producing discriminatory actions against non-citizens or “unwelcome” citizens. By instituting differences, the provisions which deny residency constitute political instruments capable of creating barriers, within which status can be recognised and defended, and beyond which “undesirables can be exiled and enemies fought” (Colombo, 2006, p. 282), quite irrespective—it is worthwhile repeating this point—of their level of enforcement. Moreover, these instruments, if they are strongly publicised, beyond producing effects of stigmatisation, can act as deterrents to persons staying within the municipal territory, discouraging from the start those who, by law, have the right to civil registration but who, in order to avoid further problems, forego residency by avoiding presenting themselves in the registry offices, and thus remaining in the condition of “ghosts” so far as the municipal administrations are concerned. Very often, however, strategies aimed at excluding certain persons from residency have politico-substantial intentions, aiming as they do at a redefinition of the borders of the local polity, in an attempt to render the real community equivalent to that community which is “imagined” by mayors and by the personnel of the municipal administrations (Gargiulo, 2012). In these cases, the acts and the procedures issued can give form to explicit mechanisms, or reinforce paths of a more indirect, if not even implicit, kind: by containing, for instance, requirements that transform into concrete demands made of applicants; requiring verifications; or seconding the requirements verbally formulated by the personnel of the registry offices. In all these circumstances, the opacity of the mechanisms in question becomes a strategic resource: the ordinances are tendentiously (though not always) visible, but the practices which they support, or which take place regardless of the issuance of an act or a measure, are hidden to such an extent that they sometimes take on the characteristics of secrecy. The persons directly interested are rarely aware of the true reasons their residency request has been denied. The responsibility for these procedures are, moreover, often not particularly clear. Finally, access to information

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is extremely difficult. The local control of residency thus appears as a specific form of social control, taking on the appearances of a system “‘hidden from the light of day’, because it is under everyone’s eyes, but altogether unknown in its articulations” (Dal Lago, 2004, p. 347). When the borders of local society are at stake, symbolic exclusion is closely followed by exclusion of a material kind, animated by selective intentions, whose aim is to establish a distinction between those local citizens who are recognised and those who are not, between legitimate and illegitimate persons. There are thus two kinds of selection which rejection of civil registration tends to bring about: spatial or redistributive. In the case in which one intends to impede a person’s access to, or continuation within, a certain space, the initiatives regarding residency work by forcing excluded persons to leave the municipal territory. Employed towards this end, these initiatives reveal themselves as mechanisms of migration control (Brochmann, 1998) acting at the local level. By restricting access to the registry office, municipal administrations seek to “filter” those persons who wish to enter or remain in their community, thus effecting a police border management. Such exclusion, while it was directly practicable in the past (Gallo, 2014), today can become effective only indirectly (Gargiulo, 2014b, 2015). Mayors, as we have seen, do not enjoy the necessary authority to expel persons to whom residency has been denied from the municipal territory. And yet, those person who live within a municipality, while not being registered, are more exposed to administrative measures of a preventative type, such as the local expulsion order (foglio di via obbligatorio): measures of this kind can indeed implicate any municipality of the Italian territory except a person’s municipality of residency.1 In theory, the use of local expulsion order should be reserved to persons who show a high capacity for delinquency in relation to crimes connected to very clear spheres and social contexts: persons, that is to say, who are rather different from those mentioned in those ordinances that employ expressions such as “social danger”. This notwithstanding, this instrument is sometimes used inappropriately to expel persons lacking in residency from the municipal territory.2

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Whoever is physically present but not administratively registered can therefore suffer a greater injury than those who appear in the civil registries; he/she risks being expelled from the place in which he/she materially passes his/her existence. Non-Italians, moreover, are exposed to another risk: expulsion might involve not only the municipal territory but also the state territory. For European citizens, failure to obtain civil registration—be it for a lack of the necessary economic requisites or on account of the person’s “social dangerousness”—produces a rather ambiguous condition of ‘irregularity’: one’s being reported to the relevant institutions (the prefectures and the Ministry of the Interior) can suffice to set off a measure ordering one’s expulsion from Italy. Even for “forced” migrants, denial of residency status generates very important consequences (Artero & Fontanari, 2018; Tuckett, 2018). Albeit in an entirely illegitimate manner,3 various police headquarters refuse to renew stay permits to asylum seekers and recipients of international protection on the basis of a lack of residency, as has been shown by a circular of the Ministry of the Interior,4 which enjoins the officials of the department of public security to interrupt this practice, and the prefectures to keep better watch over the procedures of civil registration. In the case in which an asymmetrical redistribution of goods and services is desired, the initiatives regarding residency function by impeding those who have been excluded from concretely exercising their rights in various spheres: the social, political and economic. The municipalities which carry out this “reallocation of resources” essentially seek a number of goals: to contain the costs of social spending, to reassure the electoral base constituted by the “true” local citizens and to place into a condition of disadvantage, both legally and materially, those excluded persons who do not wish—or else who cannot, even though they would like—to leave the territory in which they are not formally recognised. The local control over residency, therefore, permits obtainment of regulatory effects over the municipal population. Those persons to whom civil registration is denied are limited in their access to their social rights, obstructed from voting and potentially made more vulnerable in the job market; and they also face greater difficulties in launching entrepreneurial activities.

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Both this control and the effects it produces are justified through recourse to an ideology of social acceptability and of merit: only those persons who satisfy certain socioeconomic and behavioural requisites are held to be suitable for civil registration: the rest are considered “undesirable”, even when they are materially residents. This ideology focuses essentially on two micro-categories of individuals, against whom the exclusionary initiatives are directed. The first is constituted by persons in “unsuitable” living conditions, on account of hygienesanitary conditions or overcrowding, or else those lacking in habitation, who live in the street. The second category includes persons who are occupying structures and who attribute a political significance to their actions. Those who do not “merit” residency, in short, are marginalised persons or else persons who are politically active. Or perhaps they are both of these at once, like those refugees and asylum seekers who sleep in shacks and denounce their living precariousness and the state of working exploitation to which they are subjected (Bolzoni, Gargiulo, & Manocchi, 2015). This category of person reveals an interesting and little-investigated aspect of the question: the regulative possibilities granted by control of civil registration are wider than first appears. In specific conditions, the spatial exclusion of those deprived of civil registration constitutes both a difficult objective to attain and one that is not particularly desirable: to be present on a territory but in a minority position makes those excluded from civil registration more docile and manageable in the local labour markets. In other words, partial and differential inclusion—from a legal point of view, and consequently, from the point of view of employment—might appear to be a more advantageous choice than expulsion, both in merely politico-strategic terms and in an economic sense. The case of asylum seekers and refugees exploited in agricultural work, in areas different from those where they have their residency, is exemplary of this problem (Dines & Rigo, 2015).

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7.2 Anatomy of Administrative Separation The instruments by which civil registration is denied constitute a peculiar category in the sphere of local policies against immigrants and marginal populations. These instruments aim to draw symbolic and legal borders, which however can also produce material effects. These are administrative barriers that contain (sometimes exhibiting it and other times hiding it) a power which is not formally recognised to those who actually exercise it. They are targeted not only at the institutions which legitimately hold that power but also at specific groups present within local society. For this reason, they are reminiscent of the “new walls” spoken of by Wendy Brown (Brown, 2010). The material instruments analysed by the American scholar—which in practice take on the forms of cement, plastic or metal barriers, fences (both electric and non-electric), surveillance apparatuses, trenches, and so on—“produce a spatially demarcated ‘us’, national identity, and national political scale, when these can no longer be fashioned from conceits of national political or economic autonomy, demographic homogeneity, or shared history, culture, and values” (ibid., p. 119). Ota De Leonardis, following Brown, underlines how the new measures of division, even in their diversity, are all akin in their acting “on the territory by effecting a cut in it, dividing it”, thus confirming a “principle of separation” rather than of segregation (De Leonardis, 2013, p. 356). The Italian scholar thus sums up the difference between the walls of the old generation and of the new: “while the wall instituted a space of internment and of segregation, in which to ‘comprehend’ otherness (in the double sense of ‘taking within’ a social space and of ‘understanding’), these new walls appear rather as means of separation, with the task […] of keeping otherness outside” (ibid.). The fact that these instruments, as Brown also underlines, answer to a logic which is exercised on territories rather than on individuals, reveals a central dimension of this problem: the persons in question are essentially ignored because differences—social, economic and cultural—are translated into distances (ibid., p. 357). In contrast to the measures described by Brown and De Leonardis, the initiatives regarding residency are not physical but administrative “walls”,

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which do not express a declining sovereignty, but rather one which is not formally acknowledged to those who build them. The exhibition of a power which is not legally granted, apart from being addressed to those institutions which are politically the holders of this power, is aimed towards individuals and groups who are present within the local society. For this reason, exclusion from residency does not serve to spatially separate persons but rather to indicate borders, invisible from a spatial perspective, which internally divide the municipal population, instituting distinctions between local “grade-A” and “grade-B” citizens. The administrative barriers here analysed differ from the walls studied by Brown and De Leonardis insofar as they act on persons rather than on spaces: in a framework of physical coexistence, rather than one in which inequality is hidden through spatial distance, they create social distances by establishing symbolic stratifications, both formal and substantial. Like the instruments analysed by both the American and the Italian scholars, however, they ignore the persons that they exclude: those to whom residence is denied are not the object of a process of identification, and, therefore, are deprived of administrative identity, being reduced in this way to the status of ghosts, present but invisible.5 The ignorance that characterises these measures is to some extent “affected”. Lack of civil registration—which from the perspective of the local administration is equivalent to a choice to not “see” persons who are actually present in the municipal territory—is not without substantial consequences, as we have seen in detail. These effects are very well known to those who build administrative walls: taking recourse to these measures thus means putting in act a kind of “economy” of the use of administrative coercion and of discrimination, taking into consideration its social effects, evaluating its costs—possible anti-discriminatory reactions on the part of associations, political discrediting, legal consequences, and so on—and its benefits. The mechanisms of exclusion from residency, insofar as they are administrative barriers, aggravate civil stratification and multiply status borders. More specifically, these mechanisms provoke a fragmentation of the dichotomy between citizens and non-citizens: the two poles which constitute this dichotomy double the moment that certain persons who have right to civil registration, and effectively request it, are recognised as

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Table 7.1   Typology of the local population with right to civil registration for citizenship and residency Recognised as residents Not recognised as residents

Citizens

Non-citizens

“good” citizens undesirable citizens

“acceptable” non-citizens regular but “illegitimate” non-citizens

Source: Gargiulo (2015)

residents, while others, illegitimately, are not. Whence derives the following status typology (Table 7.1.) The first status is constituted by “good” citizens: Italians considered to be socially acceptable, since they are not perceived, nor legally branded, as “socially dangerous” or because they enjoy an abode which is appropriate by certain standards. The second status is composed of “acceptable” (at least legally) non-citizens: Europeans or foreigners with regular stay permits who present certain kinds of socioeconomic and cultural characteristics. The third status is constituted by undesirable citizens: Italians excluded from residency on account of certain unwelcome traits—they belong to the Romani population, they are without fixed abode, they have a criminal record, or, more simply, they are unemployed. The fourth and last status is constituted by regular but “illegitimate” non-citizens (Gargiulo, 2014a): Europeans or foreigners who, though they are authorised to stay by Italian law, are nonetheless not recognised at the municipal level, since they are lacking—according to the local administrations—in qualities which are held to be necessary. This figure recalls that of the authorised but not recognised individual discussed by Sassen (2006): a fully legal citizen, but one who is not altogether recognised at the social level. The scholar has in mind persons like mothers, considered not full but minority citizens, as they are excluded from numerous dimensions of public life. In the case of the regular but “illegitimate” individual, however, the privation is not only symbolic but also formal, and, in consequence, material. The effects of the mechanisms of exclusion from residency on civil stratification are observable in a still more detailed manner if we focus our attention on the “non-citizens” column of the table. Individuals with the same stay permit end up occupying different positions in the overall

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system: though they find themselves in a condition of equality so far as their legal status is concerned, if they are recognised as residents (top right), they are placed in a higher position; if they are not so recognised (bottom right), they are placed in a lower one. Consequent to these processes, the non-citizen’s potential statuses redouble. The status of the long-time resident foreigner, for example, splits in two: recognised denizen, on the one hand, and illegitimate denizen, on the other. The same thing holds for the status of the non-citizen with a regular stay permit for paid employment: regular and recognised worker versus regular but “illegitimate” worker. The downgrade provoked by the negation of local membership produces consequences on the rules of transition, which is to say, in a person’s passage to a higher status in the system of stratification. A lack of residency, apart from endangering, albeit illegitimately, renewal of a stay permit, can impede, and here legitimately, the acquisition of citizenship. The years necessary to obtain this recognition—iure soli after one has attained majority—or concession—iure domicilii after a specific period of legal presence—are counted through the registry offices: not being enrolled in those offices is equivalent to never having lived on Italian territory. Beyond citizenship, moreover, numerous benefits and services are connected to a certain number of years of residency, often understood in a civil-registrational sense: among these, free access to public transport and to public residential housing (Gargiulo, 2013) and, more recently, access to the so-called citizen’s income (reddito di cittadinanza),6 requiring a 10-year presence on Italian territory.7 Residency, in short, is not only the condition for exercising certain rights but it is also a state which, if it lasts in time, brings other rights to fruition. The mechanisms that deny it thus interact with other legal and administrative measures, from whose functioning an improvement or, to the contrary, a worsening of life might derive for those persons who often have already long struggled to obtain a condition of “regularity” (Gargiulo, 2016). These mechanisms, therefore, constitute forms of structural violence, which is to say, coercion produced by historically constituted social structures, which interfere with the needs, the capacities and the aspirations of persons (Fassin, 2010). This is a kind of violence that sparks off vicious

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circles within the pathways of differential inclusion: whoever is vulnerable does not obtain residency, and whoever has no residency becomes still more vulnerable. A kind of paradox might arise from this: when the lack of registration is produced by mechanisms centred on housing conditions, the state of an apartment, used as a pretext to exclude a person from residency, is, for the same reason, an element which guarantees a higher rank in the classifications for popular housing. Structural violence, moreover, manifests not only in the sphere of the failure to exercise rights or the incapability to obtain them but also in the sphere of exposure to often unpredictable legal risks. Being refused civil registration can have penal consequences:8 a person who has been excluded because his/her assertions—relating, for instance, to his/her habitualness of dwelling, his/her effective domicile or his/her entitlement to occupy a given structure—are contested and are not considered truthful can be accused of making false declarations.

7.3 E  xit, Voice, Loyalty: Coping with Administrative Borders There have been various reactions to the forms of exclusion from residency and to the bureaucratic obstacles put up by the municipal administrations. Some have accepted in a more or less active way the rules of the game which the institutions enforce—in consequence to the conscious adhesion to the legislative framework and to the principles that inspire it, or else because of a lack of comprehension regarding what actually takes place or, still again, out of fear of the consequences for manifesting dissent; others have explicitly contested it; and others still have decided to withdraw from it, avoiding enrolling with the civil registry. In other words, the institutional limitations can be fully accepted, simply respected, circumvented or even contested. Freely adopting the categories proposed by Hirschman (1970), the possible responses to exclusion from residency are loyalty, protest or defection. These pathways are not necessarily alternative, nor even mutually exclusive: acceptance, however formal it may be, of the limitations

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established by the authorities, can move step by step beside protest or projects for escaping from the extortion one has suffered. More specifically, the legal and administrative barriers are often accepted passively: the interested parties do not recognise their paternalistic and discipling attitude—indeed, they consider it altogether legitimate—or else they perceive the injustice which has been suffered but refuse to oppose it. It can also happen that those who are excluded from residency might effect tactics of circumvention of the legal and administrative obstacles they face, without calling into question the legislative framework itself. When this happens, we remain however within a circle of attitudes and behaviours which do not seek to modify the registry system, nor still less strive to break it apart. In other cases, however, the same tactics are put into practice with full awareness of the profoundly unjust nature of the relevant institutional mechanisms and with the intention of sabotaging them. Identical practices thus might lead to a broad variety of political orientations. Finally, those actions which aim to explicitly contest the rules of the game, and to propose their radical transformation, are of a sensibly different nature: those who adopt this position do not limit themselves to obtaining that which has been denied them, but attempt to impact the overall system, by criticising its presuppositions. Circumvention and contestation appear to be two different modalities: while the first occurs only in individual form, the second tends to appear in collective form. At first glance, therefore, only the act of contesting assumes a genuinely political character. To a more attentive glance, however, even actions aimed at navigating constraints, at least in certain conditions, carry messages critical of the standing order. The stories of persons excluded from the registry office on account of socioeconomic conditions, lifestyles and, in some cases, political orientation are quite indicative in this regard. In the first place, they have much to say about the mechanisms of passive acceptance. The illegitimate behaviours on the part of the registry officials are indeed so widespread that they are considered “normal”, in the sense of conforming to legal norms. Clearly, the relative complexity of the material, and above all the scarce awareness that the average person possesses regarding it, do not help to build a common awareness of the rules that govern residency.

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Among interviewed persons, statements like the following are quite recurrent: “They always ask you for a rent contract; without that, you can’t get residency”; “If you don’t have residency the police headquarters won’t renew your stay permit, and they won’t do it even if you only have a virtual residency”. Both of these practices are illegitimate. And yet, their extreme diffusion brings it about that they are not perceived as such by the persons to whom they are applied. The informational asymmetry between institutional actors and applicants is certainly the decisive factor in this regard. But it is not the only one. Often, the institutional actors themselves are convinced of the formal correctness of their requirements. In this sense, abuses of power cannot be identified only in terms of intentionally exclusive actions, but must also be understood in terms of professional knowledge that channels implicitly restrictive visions and frames: legal recognition of persons at the local level is considered by many registry officials to be a concession and not a right, something that must be merited and not “given away” to just anybody. The difficulty in recognising the segregating tendency of civil registration practices has effects on applicants: it nourishes feelings of passive acceptance of the state of affairs and closes the space for actions of protest, leaving to these latter, at most, enough room for merely tactical attempts to circumvent restrictions. In the case of certain persons, however, adverse material conditions produce changes in the perception and in the consciousness of the incorrectness and of the injustices which they have suffered. In various cases, it is the experience of being evicted that represents a moment of rupture, favouring an encounter between these persons and movements for the right to housing and giving rise to a means of struggling for housing. The politicisation of certain visions and actions, in other words, might be the consequence of a state of need and of actions that are carried out in order to oppose the same. The realisation that one’s residency has been cancelled is another event that influences the biographical courses of many persons. In that moment, something which seemed certain appears to grow enormously precarious, both in legal and in existential terms. It is no accident that, in response to the question “What does residency mean to you?” a fairly unequivocal answer is given: “Residency is everything: stay permit, identity card—it is everything”. “Residency is very important, it is a place where you can be

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found by anyone who looks for you. Wherever you go, they ask you for it, it is the first thing they ask for”. Civil registration, moreover, beyond guaranteeing the use of health services and social benefits, permits one to access alternatives to prison in case one is convicted of crime: for many activists, lacking this possibility is identical to concretely risking to have to forego the possibility of avoiding confinement. Once one has set off down the road of growing awareness of one’s own rights and of politicising one’s condition, there are various means of expression open to one. Individual initiatives continue to appear in the biographies of those who oppose restrictions on civil registration. In these cases, however, actions carried out individually also have a collective and extra-institutional standing: they do not represent a way of egotistically obtaining personal benefits beyond, or even against, the common interest, nor do they imply a collaboration with public actors, but they rather appear as tactics for bureaucratic survival—subletting rooms to obtain a loan for use in an apartment, or else declaring that one is resident in a structure in which one does not effectively live—within a wider framework of awareness. One of the principal problems that needs to be faced, in this respect, is the obtainment of a residence for habitual dwelling and not for domicile. This is a central question, above all for non-Italians, even those who have been present in Italy for many years. As one of the persons interviewed notes, “They have never asked me for virtual residency, it’s useless. I can’t renew my stay permit with it, and so I am invisible. Since I’m getting older I have to start thinking about retirement. I’ve been here for twenty years, since 1998”. To face so high a bureaucratic obstacle—even though it be totally illegitimate on the formal level—might bring one to various reactions, going from passive acceptance to collective mobilisation, and proceeding in this case as well through tactical choices of individual survival. This is the situation of another interviewee, a political refugee, who has been without residency for a number of years. Experiencing enormous difficulties in obtaining civil registration through his habitual dwelling, he presently has been enrolled with a virtual address as a temporary step, while he awaits a more stable and more solid solution. Adherence to forms of protest and of explicitly collective action often follows repeated, systematic experiences of exclusion. When institutional

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violence becomes structural, solidarity and shared experiences become forms of more easily practicable reaction. The stakes, at that point, are not only and exclusively the material negation of rights but also psychological and moral oppression, which proceeds along the pathways of stigmatisation. Subsequently, other experiences of the same kind do nothing but reinforce aversion towards the institutions and the sense of belonging to a collectivity, which is perceived as a unity precisely in its opposition to political choices that are injurious of rights and of the dignity of the persons involved. Paternalism and infantilisation are moreover often joined to extortion. Residency is not recognised to those who live in Temporary Housing Assistance Centres. These latter are provisional structures provided by some municipalities—particularly in Rome—to confront so-called “housing emergencies”, connected to a shortfall of public residential housing—which in reality is a structural fact and is far from being an emergency—and, at the same time, to excessively high prices of houses up for rent on the free real-estate market. Residency in the Centres is often denied insofar as these are provisional and temporary living structures. This illegitimate choice on the part of the municipal administrations (the legislation on civil registration does not set any minimal threshold for the time one has been present in the territory) is joined by another, equally illegitimate, on the part of the police headquarters, when it will not renew a stay permit on account of a lack of residency. As one interviewed activist and occupier has noted, this is a strategy enacted by the administrators of the centres: “It is a way of keeping guests in check, to push them to protest against the municipal administration”. Responses of various kinds are made to the choices taken by the municipalities. Certainly, there is no lack of individual strategies, since the situation is strongly conditioned by the asymmetry between the municipal administration and occupiers. The institutions centre their action strongly on conditions of extortability: when they exercise a strong pressure, some persons attempt to go it alone, perhaps because they have friends who suggest a solution to them or because they have been told that if they “put up two hundred euro” they can obtain residency. In moments like these, some attempt is made to form a collective, to express

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a single voice—and not merely a single strategy—but this is not easy. There are exceedingly many individuals in conditions of poverty. These, however, do not necessarily become conscious of their state, nor do they necessarily organise to overthrow it or at least to modify it. It is not at all to be taken for granted, in other words, that from a “class in and of itself ” they become “a class for itself ”. Often, however, persons who have the chance of acting singly return to the collective dimension because they realise that the path of the individual is ineffective. Essentially, the group dynamic remains central because no one trusts institutional promises. In other words, it is “the administration which artificially creates vulnerability: you are vulnerable when you are isolated, when you are within a collective dynamic you are less so”. Relations with the ASL are a mirror of this situation: they are guaranteed on the collective level: on the individual level, they are rather problematic. The category of vulnerability, beyond indicating an objectively disadvantaged material condition, is a strategic resource for the institutions. This category is indeed at the centre of an important circular on evictions issued by the Ministry of the Interior on 1 September 2018, intended to give instructions on the management of ‘arbitrary’ building occupations. The document contains clear political indications beneath its technical wording, furnishing a robust institutional support to actions of eviction. To the prefects, who are called upon to put into practice the measures of expulsion issued by the judiciary authorities, is attributed the task of identifying “a hierarchy of priorities that takes into account the ‘care of families in situations of economic or social disadvantage’” by acquiring all necessary information on persons present in the structures which are the object of these evictions. To this end, the circular indicates as the single possible solution a census “aimed at the identification, where possible, of the occupiers and of their family compositions, with particular regard for the presence within these latter of minors and other persons in situations of vulnerability; this census should also verify income situations and conditions of regular entry and stay on national territory”. Vulnerability, however, is used to exercise a continuous extortion on those persons who are not capable of finding a house for rent, and are therefore labelled “parasites”. The experience of the bonus of 516 euros

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proposed by the municipality of Rome9—connected to emergency housing and intended to encourage persons away from occupations and temporary centres—is representative of a marginalisation-government strategy based on the distinction between more “vulnerable” and less “vulnerable” persons. In this case, too, the “philosophy” underlying the measure is paternalistic and implicitly oppressive. From the perspective of the administration, a person who occupies a structure has ipso facto placed himself/herself into an illegal situation. One can help him/her to get out of it, but only given certain conditions. In other words, the choice to occupy a structure is morally and legally wrong, but it is pardonable if the interested party agrees to take a path which indicates his/her merit and willingness to change. House and residency thus become “goods” promised to those who agree to radically change their “philosophy” of life. Some have responded positively to the proposal of the municipality, while many others have been made nervous by it. As an interviewed activist and occupier notes, the persons in question are “people who have been here for twenty years, and don’t need help”. Moreover, some of those who have accepted the bonus have found their expectations shipwrecked against the failure of Roman officials to carry through: they took on rents of 800 euros, believing that they could manage to put together the remaining 300 euros, but, lacking the money which the administration was supposed to supply, they fell in arrears in just a few months. This tardiness in disbursing the subsidy has consequently reinforced the idea, held by some, that it is better to continue occupying. The institutional violence that passes through the instruments of civil registration also takes the form of monitoring. Sometimes this form is altogether explicit, as in the case of the census arranged by the prefecture, and realised by the social services, aimed at intercepting situations of vulnerability. Indeed, the so-called social census has the objective of identifying those persons against whom it would be fitting to effect a softer treatment, by finding alternative solutions for these persons before proceeding with eviction, and to separate them from those against whom it is possible to use less “delicate” methods. This type of monitoring, moreover, implies an actual influence on life choices: the above-cited circular of 1 September 2018 stipulates that before proceeding with evictions it should be determined whether there

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are persons who might take care of the evicted. The administration, in other words, seeks to encourage the “care-taking” of these individuals by relatives and friends, thus externalising its own welfare responsibility. If the person in question is resident in a distant municipality, or in any case was once rooted elsewhere, the institutional initiative also takes on the contours of a clear interference in choices of mobility. As one interviewed activist and occupier explains, who was formally a resident with her family of origin in a Sicilian municipality, the message sent by the municipality is essentially the following: “Why don’t you go back to your hometown?” To which she responds: “I refuse to accept this reasoning; it should be opposed, I am a free woman and I’ll do what I want”. Once again, the asymmetries in conditions of life, both formal and material, evidently appear. Notwithstanding the fact that the logic of monitoring is perceived by many, very few can oppose it: persons without Italian citizenship, or Italian women with children in their care, are constrained to accept the conditions dictated by the institutions. As the interviewed activist and occupier lucidly notes, “I can’t be blackmailed, while others can”. The strategies of control also manifest in the procedures relative to virtual residency: in Rome, just as in the cases analysed above in Florence and Milan, a constant relation with the social services is necessary to obtain civil registration. Those who do not accept this are systematically denied residency. This problem concerns above all persons without fixed abode and those who occupy structures. The imposition of a continuous contact with care facilities generates widespread discontent: many persons—above all members of the Romani population—fear that the social services will take away their minor children. While in this case too there is a variety of reactions, radical protest is viable only for some. Indeed, some persons have completely refused to register, declining refusing to make any declarations in the municipal offices and remaining in the condition of bureaucratic “ghosts”. But these are isolated cases, sometimes persons with Italian citizenship who, as such, find themselves in “privileged” situations, and can therefore exist without civil registration and without running the risk of being expelled from the country, or else youths who choose a path of open conflict, or yet again of persons who have freely chosen to live in the street and who

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consequently conceive of civil registration as an invasion into their personal sphere. As one occupier and activist observes, “Only some Italians have accepted virtual residency, because they don’t like the idea. It’s a question of principle to them, and rightly so. But they can get away with this because they aren’t blackmailed by their stay permits”. Some put the matter as follows: “I don’t want virtual residency, I don’t want to go to the social services as if I were a person in need of help”. The same activist and occupier mentioned considers her case to be exemplary: “I refuse to get residency at an imaginary address, to have it written on my identity card. Having said that, I can get away with this, not only because I’m Italian, but because I don’t have any children and because I’m healthy”. The strategies of resistance analysed here can be considered as part of broader struggles for migrants’ rights and the right to the city. In Italy, such struggles have been conducted in the last decades by many migrants and Italian activists. Initially, they were mainly focused on two issues: combatting racism and workers’ rights for migrant labourers. A turning point in the Italian history of migrant forms of resistance was the murder of Jerry Essan Masslo, a South African asylum seeker, casual farm worker and anti-apartheid activist who was killed on August 25 of 1989 by a commando of hooded and armed men, after he and others had refused to surrender their money to them (Colucci, 2018). In 1988, Masslo had been denied asylum, since at that time the “geographic reserve” clause imposed a restriction to preclude the right to international protection to people who were not citizens of the Eastern bloc. Living in Italy as an irregular migrant, Masslo, for the second consecutive summer, had found accommodation in an abandoned house with no facilities near the town of Villa Literno, in the Campania region, where, together with other migrants, he toiled for a scarce salary picking tomatoes, and lived in conditions of extreme precariousness. His murder was not an isolated episode: violent racist attacks and intimidations against foreign workers had been recorded in the area since 1986. Moreover, it happened in a hostile political environment: local administrations of the area refused to provide any form of assistance to seasonal workers so as to satisfy the requests of some sectors of the citizenry and political class that were waging a strong opposition (Di Luzio, 2006).

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The dual identity of Masslo—that of a denied asylum seeker and of a precarious worker without rights—is symbolic of the condition of migrant labour in Italy: “at the time, casual farm labourers were for the most part undocumented and always worked without a labour contract and social insurance, for well below the minimum wage” (Peano, 2017). “Illegality” and exploitation, already then, were the two faces of the ambiguous political management of immigration. Moreover, the condition of migrant-labourer, Masslo’s as well as that of many others in similar situations, was forced into a mould of analysis that considered migrants’ predicament as exceptional, rather than recognising it as the vanguard for a generalised precarisation process. Such exceptionality was in turn constrained within another supposed anomaly, that of southern Italy, represented as a place where archaic conditions of backwardness persisted in the present and proliferated through equally anomalous mafia-related violence (ibid.; Peano, 2016). The murder of Masslo accelerated a process of self-organisation that had already started. Migrant agricultural workers in the area, with the support of local activists, put into place the first embryo of self-organised unionism demanding, among other things, the application of the 1986 amnesty for undocumented migrants, as well as housing and healthcare (Peano, 2017). In the aftermath of Masslo’s death, an anti-racist demonstration took place in Rome 1 October 1989, gathering over 200 thousand people, and was preceded by a much-less publicised and memorialised strike of some 300 African farm labourers, most of them were undocumented, against the exploitation they were subjected to by gangmasters and the Camorra (Di Luzio, 2006). The demonstrations in solidarity with Masslo, which aimed to denounce life and labour conditions of migrants, marked the birth of an anti-racist movement in Italy (Colucci, 2018). In the following decades, the conditions of migrant workers have become a progressively relevant issue both for Italian social movements and for self-organised migrants. Agricultural migrant workers have been the most affected by the processes of exploitation. With the rise of the so-called North Africa Emergency in 2011, and more in general as an effect of the emergency management of migrations that has taken place in Italy, especially asylum seekers and refugees have been the object of exploitation in agricultural

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work. An actual “refugeeisation” of the workforce has taken form (Dines & Rigo, 2015), characterised by an intensification of the process of racialisation of “forced” migrants (Mellino, 2019). Agricultural migrant workers have also been the most active in carrying out strategies of resistance, in the south of Italy (Avallone, 2017; Caruso, 2015; De Giglio, 2011; Peano, 2016, 2017; Perrotta, 2015; Perrotta & Sacchetto, 2014) as well as in the north (Piacentini, 2011; Cobbe & Grappi, 2011). However, the migrants working in other economic sectors—industry as well as street vending—have also shown several forms of political activation (Molinero Gerbeau & Avallone, 2020; Mometti & Ricciardi, 2011). During the last decades, other forms and experiences of struggle involving migrants were already visible in Italy. The right to housing has been a key issue within these movements since the late 1980s. As a consequence of the economic crisis of 2008 and the resulting austerity policies, they experienced a significant revival. Migrants have played a significant role in many housing movements, in terms of both numbers and organisational capacity (Mudu, 2014; Nur & Sethman, 2017). These struggles have not only resulted in the occupation of empty buildings as an immediate solution to the emergency, but have also included anti-eviction pickets and rallies with more explicit political aims, also in terms of counter-racialisation, through various forms of protest and action: “by contesting measures of institutional racism (illegal occupation of a property as grounds for refusing legal residence; legal residence as a condition for renewing the permit to stay; length of residence as a requirement for social housing); by creating solidarity between nationals and non-nationals facing evictions; by reframing housing issues beyond ethnic competition in terms of structural problems, failures and deliberate choices of national and local housing policies” (Oliveri, 2018, p. 1867). Given the lack of a top-down organisation of urban services, Italian and non-Italian urban dwellers and activists “developed autonomous organisational practices and strategies of survival capable of creating networks of resistance and solidarity, while tackling the absence of institutions and even basic infrastructure such as drainage systems and electricity” (Grazioli & Caciagli, 2018).

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This way, migrant and native movements have both theoretically and practically invoked the notion of urban commons, and have attempted a counter-hegemonic production of space and resistance as opposed to financial speculation and a profit-oriented paradigm of the urban fabric (Galdini, 2015). Hence, “housing squats are relevant beyond their numeric magnitude on an urban and national scale, starting from the relevance of housing to financial valorisation and capitalist social reproduction” (Grazioli, 2017, p. 395). To the extent that “these practices of organisation and resistance allow us to rethink the theoretical appraisal of the notion of citizenship inside conflicted urban environments. Indeed, the erosion of welfare in the name of austerity triggers forms of self-­ organisation that are joining migrant and native citizens, following on from a condition of severe material deprivation” (ibid.).

7.4 A Quick Look Beyond Italy The local control on the conferment of local status memberships is a phenomenon that does not concern Italy alone. In other countries too, municipal authorities regulate the formal recognition of those who live within their territories or desire to enter them. In some cases, they apply national regulations, acting on behalf of state authorities. In other cases, they bypass or even violate these regulations, thus exercising an autonomous yet illegal power. This power can be exercised to expand people’s rights and recognise statuses or, on the contrary, to shrink rights and exclude individuals from formal recognition. China is the most vivid example of a state that controls local registration, delegating to local authorities the task of concretely registering people. In the People’s Republic of China, the hukou system is in force. This is a family-based residency registration device. Its role is crucial, as the actual enjoyment of welfare provisions and services takes place exclusively if a person is registered. Moreover, this device is used for regulating internal migrations, adapting them to the needs of the national economic system. Hukou basically aims at better administration of public finance resources by distributing the costs of welfare among the different levels of

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government—central state, provinces and municipalities—and the diverse internal territories. The hukou system was concretely introduced in 1958, despite its tension with the first Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, issued in 1954. Article 5 of that constitution established the right to free movement and migration for all Chinese people. The hukou system was conceived to be serviceable to the politics and policies of the communist government. At that time, China had started an industrialisation plan similar to that realised in the Soviet Union, granting a key role to cities and considering rural areas dependent on urban ones. Basically, the hukou system split the population into urban and rural inhabitants, bestowing on each person a place and a kind of registration, which would then be handed down from mother to son and daughter. The family logic of registration was essential to ensuring the maintenance of the hukou system, especially in rural areas (Dutton, 1999). The economic efforts of the communist government were therefore mostly focused on cities, by producing food, work, and services for its inhabitants. At the same time, the rural population had to be tightly linked to the countryside, as people residing there were totally committed to producing the resources necessary for the sustenance of the urban population. To this end, all internal movements had to be approved by the government, with the consequence that a huge rural population was prevented from legally moving towards the cities, and was rather forced to become a workforce completely devoted to agricultural production. Clearly, many people continued to move in spite of the ban. Thus, they became “illegal citizens”, de facto present within the urban space, yet de jure not authorised to stay there, and lacking in registration (Gargiulo & Mastandrea, 2020). Until the end of the seventies, the hukou system substantially remained unchanged. But with Deng’s rise to power, the restrictions on registration were mitigated in order to better meet the new needs of the economic system (Buckingham & Chan, 2008). Neoliberal economic reforms, together with some changes to the rules of registration, accelerated internal movements (Mallee, 2003). As a consequence, a huge migration towards the cities started.

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In 1989, things changed once more: the State Council promulgated a law meant to counter the urbanisation by prevent internal immigrants from entering the cities. This law relaunched the hukou system, based now on a principle of differential inclusion: citizens who met certain criteria of deservingness—those who showed the will to invest in specific urban areas or take over commercial activities, or who were holders of high educational degrees—could obtain the so-called bluestamp hukou, assigned through an idea of meritocracy showing characteristics of a social class (Gargiulo & Mastandrea, 2020). The same principle of differential inclusion inspired the creation of hukou permits reserved to those who worked in the Special Economic Zones established at the end of the seventies. Basically, a system of double hukou allowed people to have a registration in their place of birth and another in their SEZ of residence. In this case, too, the restriction on the right to residency was serviceable to government policies which aimed at promoting economic development by creating a huge set of workers moving between different jobs in various sweat-shops. In recent years, several reform projects have redefined the functions of hukou, adapting them to the new developmental needs of the country. However, the main traits of this system have not changed. The hukou reform of 2014 emphasises the importance of urbanisation and theoretically aims to facilitate the procedures of registration. But this concerns only small- or medium-size cities, without affecting big urban centres, which are definitely more attractive, as they offer better welfare services and benefits. In short, even though the distinction between urban and rural resident was almost completely abrogated, the difference between local and non-local hukou has remained in force. As a consequence, the possibility of having residency in the most populated and developed cities of the country—such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Nanjing—is still restricted to the upper class and the highly skilled, the only ones who are able to obtain a permit to reside there (Fan, 2008). Basically, the hukou system works as a filter, consisting of legal and administrative borders that prevent the better part of people from legally living in certain areas of the country. This means that in China a sort of legal urban citizenship exists, as people are formally registered by the single municipality in accordance with national laws and regulations.

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Chinese urban citizenship is differentiated and stratified inasmuch as it draws a line between urban and non-urban residents. This line is legally established, and acts as an internal border restricting internal movements and selectively regulating access to welfare. In the Chinese context, therefore, social stratification and differential inclusion are key concepts for understanding the current regime of status borders and mobility. Only some parts of the Chinese population are free to move and have the right to legally settle where they want, obtaining there the status of local citizens. This selective access to membership statuses has a strong economic function, as it aims to foster the productive needs of the Chinese economy (Froissart, 2008). In the United States, “cities are subordinate to states and to the federal government, and they have no independent powers. Constitutional law sees cities merely as administrative creatures of the various states with the responsibility to assist them in carrying out state government functions” (De Graauw, 2014, p.  312). In this scenario, many cities have been granted by states broad police powers to regulate and protect the health, safety, and welfare of their residents, and they enjoy more policymaking discretion due to the federal devolution of government responsibilities (ibid., pp. 312–313). However, local authorities, in producing their legislation, have to conform to state and federal laws. In contrast to that of China, the US government does not control internal migrations and does not demand local authorities to mandatorily register people who reside within their borders. Thus, there is no organised and uniform device of registration for people who live in the various municipalities. Moreover, in the United States, as opposed to Italy, there are, technically speaking, no ID cards, even though driver’s licences and social security cards have more or less the same function (Torpey, 2019). Despite the lack of a standard paper tool aiming to identify people, these government-issued identification documents are increasingly necessary, as they give actual access to locations and services. After the attacks of 2001, Congress enacted the Real ID Act of 2005, which imposes national security standards for state-issued photo IDs. As an effect of this law, “immigrants must provide proof of lawful immigration status to obtain a driver’s license or state ID card, thereby making it impossible for undocumented immigrants to get state-issued photo IDs

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that federal agencies will accept for official purposes” (De Graauw, 2014, p. 312). In 2011, only New Mexico, Utah and Washington licensed laws which do not require proof of citizenship or legal residency. Consequently, the impossibility of obtaining government-issued ID has discouraged undocumented immigrants from accessing public services, making them reluctant to contact those government institutions that can safeguard their rights, and limiting their freedom of movement within the country (ibid.). In this legal scenario, some cities and towns have acted in order to further shrink undocumented immigrants’ rights and status. For example, several municipalities have enforced existing ordinances or issued new ordinances against daily workers, often presumed to be irregular immigrants (Varsanyi, 2006, 2010). On the other hand, other cities and towns have autonomously decided to expand membership rights, privileges and benefits to those immigrants who are de facto residents but who lack legal authorisation to remain in the United States. These local governments resort to a wide set of policies and practices. Some municipalities give their front-line bureaucrats—police, teachers, librarians, nurses, etc.—“don’t ask, don’t tell” mandates, meaning do not ask for information on immigrants’ legal statuses, and, if in possession of such information, do not share it with federal immigration authorities (Varsanyi, 2019). Others have decided to accept multiple forms of photo identification: consular and municipal identification cards, in addition to state-­ issued driver’s licences. In this way, they confer undocumented immigrants broader benefits of social and community membership and allow “individuals to access a broad range of local services, facilities, and transactions such as opening a bank account, applying for marriage licences, obtaining a library card, enrolling children in school, and so forth” (ibid.). Some other municipalities issue municipal ID cards, documents aiming at advancing the civic integration of city residents who have difficulty to obtain government-issued identification documents, especially, but not only, undocumented immigrants. These cards are available to all city residents, regardless of immigration or citizenship status. They are valid only in the city that issued them and can be used for identification with police, school, and other city officials as well as local

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banks and stores. They serve purposes other than identification and function also as library cards, discount cards for local businesses, and prepaid and full-fledged debit cards. Soon, they will likely also serve as public transit cards. Municipal IDs do not, however, confer legal status, give authorization to work or permission to drive, prove legal age to purchase alcohol or tobacco, establish new city benefits for cardholders, or change cardholders’ eligibility for any existing local, state, or federal benefits or services. (De Graauw, 2014, p. 313)

Basically, municipal ID cards make the interactions between undocumented immigrants and street-level bureaucrats safer, also facilitating their movements within the city. These documents also make the participation in  local commerce and access to municipal facilities easier. De Graauw depicts municipal ID cards as local bureaucratic membership, their main goal being as it is “to facilitate access to municipal service bureaucracies for undocumented immigrants, who—to the detriment of both their own and other city residents’ health, safety and welfare—tend to avoid contact with government officials and agencies” (De Graauw, 2014, p. 314). More generally, there are cities that decide to broaden their bureaucratic and social protection tools to illegal immigrants, so as to guarantee a sort of municipal “immunity” from state powers and control. These urban centres are often labelled as “sanctuary cities” as they provide undocumented people a sort of “immunity” from state authorities. According to some scholars, the experiences of sanctuary cities are de facto forms of urban citizenship: “in a country that radically excludes unauthorised immigrants from political membership and national citizenship (but not necessarily economic participation), subnational jurisdictions including cities, counties, and states have been at the forefront of extending rights and privileges of membership to their residents who otherwise do not have legal authorisation to remain in the United States” (Varsanyi, 2019). In a time of growing nativism, the wide set of policies and practices attempted in sanctuary cities are all devoted to offering inclusion and the recognition of de facto membership to all residents, regardless of their legal status (ibid.).

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Hence, even though in the United States a formal status of local membership does not exist and the government lacks a central policy of control for the internal movements and identification of people living in the individual municipalities of the country, there is clear evidence of bottom-­up processes of urban citizenship construction. The actions of some local governments show how, despite federal regulations and the role assigned to municipalities by national laws, a membership status is taking form. Certainly, this is not a formal status comparable to those existing in other countries. But the fact that it embraces illegal immigrants makes it an original and sound experiment of embryonic local citizenship. In Spain, in contrast to the United States and similarly to China and Italy, a local system of registration of people habitually dwelling within the single municipalities exists. The particularity of the Spanish system, called padrón municipal, is that even undocumented immigrants hold the right to be registered. Padrón municipal, in more detail, “provides a material basis for a local status, which is independent of a residence permit, because registration only requires a passport and proof of domicile” (Gebhardt, 2015, p. 11). According to Law 7/1985, “every person living in Spain is obliged to register in the municipal census of the municipality of residence” (Art. 15). Law 4/1996 has made the registration of foreigners easier and more flexible by establishing that for “habitual residence” is meant the mere fact of being, for a certain amount of time, within the borders of a municipal territory, without any obligation of showing other proofs of formal residence, as, for example, a rental agreement. Non-Spanish citizens are therefore expected to exhibit just a few documents in order to obtain registration (Scuto, 2011). Moreover, at the base of the Aliens Law (4/2000), municipalities are charged with the task of registering foreigners, but are not allowed to perform any kind of checks regarding their legal presence in the national territory. This is a precautionary mandate aimed at avoiding a situation in which irregular immigrants might decide not to register, as they might be afraid to reveal their illegal condition and to incur sanctions. Just how well this fear was founded was confirmed some years later, when the Alien Law n. 14/2003 reduced the legal protection for undocumented people, allowing police forces to have access to registers (De Cortázar & Nebreda, 2000).

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This shows that registration in Spain plays the role of a mechanism of migration control—a control, however, that takes the form of monitoring rather than impeding individual movement. Basically, like the Italian anagrafe, the Spanish padrón is conceived of as a statistical device, the purpose of which is to know what persons live within a territory, and not to be a mobility-prevention tool, aimed at regulating internal migrations. Nevertheless, in Spain, as opposed to Italy, this device enjoys a higher degree of precision: by registering undocumented immigrants, too, the authorities obtain a more accurate picture of the individuals dislocated in a certain space. Besides being a statistical tool of knowledge, the padrón is considered by national authorities to be a tool for immigrants’ integration. According to the regulations for the Aliens Law of 2004, town or city councils “produce the social inclusion reports necessary for attaining legal status through arraigo social (social rootedness) as well as housing reports for family reunification” (Garcés-Mascareñas, 2014, p. 13). Moreover—as in Italy and China—the padrón also has administrative functions, allowing access to welfare services and provisions. It therefore plays an essential role, especially for foreigners. The Aliens Law made basic rights such as health, housing and free legal aid accessible for every person, on condition that they are registered in the padrón (or municipal census). Consequently, undocumented immigrants can exercise these rights, given that registration is not dependent on one’s possession of a stay permit. Moreover, a subsequent Aliens Law (8/2000) introduced some restrictions to the access to rights, even though the access to education and health services are still conditional on the empadronamiento. In addition, various local regulations also linked to access to certain municipal services (such as the use of public libraries, sports centres or schools and crèches) or to obtaining some social benefits (such as grants funding food-service fees in public schools) to registration in the municipal census. In Spain, the padrón is considered a merely administrative procedure, with regard to which municipalities do not have an active and autonomous role. However, local authorities often introduce requirements not provided for by the law and its regulations. More specifically,

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the administrative practices of local councils (frequently with a significant discretionary component) take on a decisive role with vital implications in terms of access to social services, legal status, and the rights of foreign citizens in Spain. Councils with more inclusive practices pave the way for registration in the municipal census of irregular immigrants (for example, even in cases where the person has no fixed address) and, by this means, provide access to health services and education as well as favouring their chances of obtaining legal status in future. More open administrative practices with regard to the reports on social inclusion and housing lead to higher levels of success in the processes of legalisation and family reunification. In contrast, councils with practices that are more exclusionary and, in some cases, illegal (for example, by requiring a residence permit for registration in the municipal census) effectively restrict access to public services and reduce the possibilities of legalisation and family reunification. (Garcés-Mascareñas, 2014, p. 6)

As in Italy, discretionary power can therefore turn into a device of exclusion or differential inclusion, not only with regard to registration in itself but also with respect to the procedures for obtaining a legal status, having access to housing and exercising the right to family reunification. Hence, the abuse of the padrón can increase the degree of civic stratification, preventing people from getting a better status and exercising their rights. Moreover, the possibility that police forces use the municipal registers to locate illegal immigrants makes this administrative tool a strategic device for social control.

Notes 1. In Italy after unification, the use of local expulsion orders was introduced by the Pica Law (n. 1409/1863), the law which originated the preventative measures. This measure took as its objective transferring persons who had reached the term of their house arrest (a form of obligatory stay, which could be assigned for a period not exceeding a year, to “Camorra members”, “idlers”, “vagrants” and “suspect persons”) back to the municipality these persons had chosen for their residency. In the context of republican Italy, Law n. 1423/1956 modifies these local expulsion orders, consenting

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their use in the case of a vast category of persons: “individuals involved in the trafficking of illegal goods and other illegal activities, or in behaviours contrary to the public morality”, but also to simple “idlers” and “habitual vagrants, such as are capable of working”. The connection between unemployment and expulsion survived up to 1988, when Law n. 327 eliminated the reference to idlers and vagrants, along with that regarding the public morality, and introduced referenced to persons involved in “the commission of crimes which offend or endanger the physical or moral integrity of minors, the public health, public security or peace”. The catalogue of individuals who could be expelled from the territory of a municipality remained subsequently unchanged, even after the entrance in force of Legislative Decree n. 159/2011, Code on the Anti-mafia Laws and on Preventative Measures, the last law in which reference was made to local expulsion orders. 2. The abuse of this instrument is moreover evident in various areas of civil registration. The case of the Susa valley and of the measures taken against certain militant members of the NO-TAV movement, for actions and behaviours which are not prohibited by the relative laws, for example, demonstrates how local expulsion orders can easily transform into an instrument of control turned against “undesirable” persons—in this case, persons considered “politically” dangerous—even if they be clearly lacking in that capacity for delinquency which ought to be the necessary prerequisite for its adoption. Moreover, the urban DASPO (Prohibition against sportive protests), introduced by the MinnitiOrlando Law on security and strengthened by the Salvini Law, brings back in through the window prerogatives which had been thrown out the door at the end of the 1980s: “abusive” merchants, sexual workers, persons with drug dependencies, “beggars” of a more or less “harassing” kind (but we could surely go on) seem to be once more vulnerable to expulsion, albeit expulsion from intra-urban areas rather than from the entire municipality. 3. They are illegitimate insofar as “the regularity of a person’s stay is not invalidated by a lack of civil registration, which, just as it cannot justify the cessation of or failure to enrol in the national health service, cannot be a reason to revoke the person’s stay permit, or to deny or to dismiss a request to renew the same” (Morozzo della Rocca, 2019).

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4. Circular n. 2972/2015. 5. This does not preclude, however, the possibility that they might be recognised by, and visible to, other public apparatuses, both local (municipal police, social and sanitary services) and central but locally dislocated (the prefecture, the police headquarters). 6. This is a sort of basic income, but restricted to people whose income is lower than a certain threshold. 7. The last 2 years of the full 10 required, moreover, must be continuous, as specified by Art. 2 of the law that instituted this measure, Decree-Law n. 4/2019, transformed into Law n. 26/2019. 8. Beyond the refusal obtain civil registration, even the simple violation of an ordinance can, by itself, provoke penal consequences: the failure to respect a provision of this kind, in some cases, implicates penal responsibility, per Art. 650 of the Penal Code, understood as a breach of authority (Mondino, 2015). 9. Available at the following address: https://www.comune.roma.it/web/it/ notizia/emergenza-abitativa-avviso-per-immobili-da-affittare-con-contributo-comunale.page.

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8 Conclusive Remarks: What Is at Stake in Residency?

As this book has attempted to show, two main issues are at stake in the conflicts surrounding civil registration. The first concerns the legal formalisation of the relationship between individual and territory on the local level. The conditions by which legal recognition is granted to those who live in a given territory or those who are tied to the same can be conditioned by various criteria. Recognition can be equal for all or, on the contrary, it can differ on the basis of certain criteria. By a narrow vision of local citizenship, the articulation of a society into legal statuses represents a normal state of affairs, one which is taken for granted and therefore legitimate. Consequently, the condition of being a member of the municipal community must be “earned”, as is the case with other legal statuses: it is a concession made to whomever merits it, and not a right recognised to everyone indiscriminately. From this perspective, the citizens of a state have priority with respect to legal non-­ citizens, and the latter with respect to irregular non-citizens. The civil stratification arising from a system of membership statuses on the supranational and national levels must be reflected also on the local level. Consequently, residency is not required to level out the differences

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between citizens and non-citizens, nor, within this last group, the differences between regular and irregular non-citizens. An enlarged conception of local citizenship, on the other hand, departs from the presupposition that simple presence on a territory, and not the legal status which one enjoys, is the central element qualifying local membership. Being in a place, in other words, has in and of itself a normative meaning. The principle of civil stratification as the “natural order of a society” is opposed to another: that of ethical territoriality (Bosniak, 2006). According to this last, an individual who lives in a territory, or who in any case is tied to a territory, must be recognised as a full and effective member thereof (Carens, 1987). From this perspective, citizens do not have any priority as compared to non-citizens. Indeed, the differences in status must not in any way influence the recognition that should be given to those who live and dwell in a territory, irrespective of their legal condition. In this case, the stakes are the following: who has the right to belong to a local population, obtaining the status of local citizen de jure? Those who are de facto present on a territory or in a municipality, or in any case are connected to it in a significant way, or those who possess a formal status that ties them to the state to which that municipality belongs? The second question relates to the visibility and the invisibility of certain persons and to the implications of a variety of related choices. The decision can be taken to keep track of those who stay within a given spatial area or, on the contrary, to omit them from registration. These two alternative choices are effected and justified through very diverse motivations. But above all, they lead to consequences which differ from one another altogether. The choice to render visible all those dwelling in a given territory might take as its objective the prevention and the more effective repression of various kinds of deviant behaviours, or else it might aim at better redistribution of economic resources and welfare. In both cases, it is necessary to form an accurate picture of the population. A choice of this kind, regardless of its motivations, produces as a consequence a detailed monitoring of the territory and of those dwelling within it. On the other hand, the choice to render only certain components of the population visible, leaving others invisible in an administrative sense, answers to the desire to asymmetrically allocate benefits and services,

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guaranteeing them only to local citizens who are considered “deserving”, or to give priority, whether symbolic or material, to the latter, avoiding recognition of “undeserving” persons. A choice of this kind, however, renders the civil registries’ representation of the population less accurate, if not entirely distorted. The two choices, however, are incompatible with one another: if one wishes to pick and choose among registry applicants, one must forego monitoring them in a complete fashion, and vice-versa. Moreover, the selective choice rests on motivations which are entirely ambiguous and produces paradoxical effects. An asymmetrical allocation of welfare resources worsens the conditions of economic deprivation of those persons excluded from civil registration, and jeopardises the trust and the faith which is granted to local institutions. In this way, it presses those same persons towards behaviours which are considered socially, and even legally, deviant: poor persons who do not receive the support of social policies are certainly more exposed to the risk of finding themselves constrained to accept off-the-books work or to have recourse to illegal means of obtaining an income. However, the selection effected through the civil registry, though it is often rhetorically justified through the will to protect the “honest” population, creates social and economic unrest in excluded persons, which can translate into deviancy and, consequently, into greater risks for the security of the entire population. To use again the words of Robert Castel, who distinguishes between civil security—which coincides with the safety of persons and their property—and social security—which has to do with protection from risks connected to work, to health and to the economic sphere (Castel, 2003)—one might say that the various choices in the civil registry answer to different visions of these two forms of security. Those who use the municipal registries in a correct way aim at protecting the first and wish to guarantee the second universally. Those who use these forms of security in an improper way, on the other hand, actually put the first at risk, even though they rhetorically evoke it, and conceive the second in a particularistic way, considering rights to be a limited patrimony, rather than a common and shared one. Depending on the vision of security to which one adheres, the civil registries are used in different ways.

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Two principles are thus in disagreement here. While, on the one hand, attention is centred on the monitoring of the territory, on the other hand, the allocation of benefits and social services is brought to the foreground. This conflict between different political objectives is a reality characterising countries other than Italy. As has been seen, residency in several states represents a field of tensions and conflicts between actors placed at various levels of the government. The game which is played on this field goes well beyond the plane of legal rules and manifests the presence of radically opposed visions for what associated life should be on the local level. The exclusion from residency has a profound impact on value choices and normative orientations. Local membership status is denied by invoking economic conditions as a pretext, along with people’s way of living (having a home in “indecorous” conditions), previous behaviour (a criminal record) or attitudes and traits, as perceived from the outside (being regarded as “socially dangerous”). In this respect, the denial of the right to civil registration is based on moral judgements. The mechanisms which, at the local level, separate residents who are considered “legitimate” from people who are not acknowledged as fully belonging to the local community employ the logic and grammar of deservingness. Whereas in other contexts, as several studies have shown, “a fair performance in terms of worthiness” is of central importance for achieving the status of “regular” migrant (Bonizzoni, 2020; Bonizzoni, Marzorati, & Semprebon, 2017; Chauvin & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2012, 2014); in the case analysed in this book worthiness translates into the requirements for residency. The devices which, in the name of security and public order, select “worthy” residents while leaving “unworthy” ones out thus reflect a far from egalitarian view of society. By and large, it seems as though the appeal to the safeguarding of public order and security is intended not so much to promote orderly and civilised coexistence but to affirm a certain idea of social order (Fassin, 2010), mostly based on private property as its core “value”: non-citizens and “undesirable” citizens are reminded of their place in the local community; at the same time, unwelcome habits and behaviours, considered typical of certain social groups, are banned. However, still another game is played around the question of residency, a game which is less evident but not for this reason less important. From

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the perspective of persons to whom civil registration is denied, invisibility can become not only a risk to avoid but also a resource to exploit. The lack of registration can be experienced as a means for subtracting oneself from the view of institutions which are perceived as being unjust, liberticide and repressive. The question of visibility/invisibility thus shows how residency, both as a right and as a duty, is an ambivalent theoretical and legal construct: the complete registration of persons, while on the one hand it makes for a form of legal equality—insofar as local membership eliminates the differences stemming from national and supranational memberships—on the other hand contributes to extending institutional invasiveness, consolidating its legitimate monopoly, not only over the freedom of movement but also over the attribution of a person’s administrative existence. Residency thus betrays its dual character: it is claimed as a right, since it represents a fundamental channel for emancipation from material needs, but it constitutes a bureaucratic cage within a broader system of surveillance. As a form of bureaucratic inscription (Horton & Heyman, 2020), it shows the ambiguities of power. At present, it is evident that the civil registry is not generally used for security reasons—which is to say, as an instrument for police control. And yet, the ambivalence within the civil registry contributes to rendering evident certain little-visible aspects of the form of social control practised in the politico-economic system in which we live. While the procedures of identification and registration generally bring public institutions to “embrace” all persons, protecting them and at the same time binding them, the civil registry, in particular, translates this “embrace” into the administrative formalisation of affective and material bonds. A highly formalised and potentially invasive bureaucratic system, therefore, constitutes the obligatory channel through which one can concretely exercise one’s rights and, at the same time, a provision which can potentially limit political viability and individual autonomy. Capitalism is characterised by the tendency to formalise a vast complex of different spheres of associative life. Activities of care form one of these spheres: domestic and reproductive activities, often characterised by a certain degree of emotional involvement, are brought back within a formal and salaried system of work. It is no accident that numerous feminist reflections underline how this subsumption, while on the one hand being

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equivalent to legal and economic recognition, on the other entails the risk of favouring the progressive commodification of social relations, bringing non-capitalistic spheres of life within the purview of capitalistic reasoning and regimes. At the same time, however, capitalism betrays another tendency: the full commodification and the complete legalisation of relationships and social bonds is not entirely desirable from the perspective of economic actors. An elevated degree of informalisation, and not of legally recognised salaried work, is vital for the survival of the capitalistic system (Tabak & Crichlow, 2000). Economic accumulation is indeed “structurally dependent on the appropriation of an immense quantity of workforce and resources that must appear external to the economy of the market, such as the unpaid domestic work that women have furnished and on which the system depends for the reproduction of the workforce” (Federici, 2004, p. 66). From this perspective, the forms of legal exclusion from residency constitute measures favouring the extraction of surplus value: exploitation in farmlands in services or in small industries—sectors in which, in Italy, as elsewhere, informality often plays a central role—is enormously facilitated by the availability of workers without rights. The stakes of residency are, therefore, varied and highly interrelated. Through civil registration, one can, at one and the same time, guarantee individual autonomy and exercise control over it, favour liberty and maintain a state of subordination. Historically, as we have seen, the obligation to possess civil registration in a municipality has constituted an instrument for forcing physical permanency and enabling economic extortion with regard to the poor and the unemployed. With the emergency of the civil registries, however, it became apparent how this obligation was problematic for many municipalities: to formally recognise a person insofar as he/she is present on a given territory means to take responsibility for his/her welfare. In contexts like the Italian, while there presently exists the obligation to declare one’s residency or domicile, the degree of coercion exercised through the civil registry is rather low. That need to monitor the territory, which stands at the bottom of the introduction of the civil registry, has much more to do with the efficacy and the efficiency of the allocation of benefits and services, than with the

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police monitoring of persons and of their movements. On the other hand, the selective use of the municipal registries continues to be strategic: rather than obliging individuals to stay legally on a given territory, preference is rather given to rendering individuals considered marginal or undesirable invisible in the administrative sense, or perhaps forcing them to leave a given territory in a “voluntary” way. The analysis of residency and of the stakes involved in it thus demonstrates how, even at the local level, two practices apparently opposed to each other but in reality complementary are likewise relevant in the sphere of the capitalistic system: on the one hand, to legally exclude a person, taking away his/her rights and threatening him/her with expulsion; and on the other, to spatially and economically include a person, but in a differential and subordinate way. By way of these two practices, a person’s administrative presence and existence are rendered precarious: membership status is denied to persons who actually form part of a local society. In conclusion, the existence of this kind of status borders clearly evidences the way in which institutional actors look upon the individuals who occupy the lowest rungs of the ladder of civil stratification, and sometimes even those located a little bit higher up on the ladder. There are two alternating, and sometimes overlapping, representations of such persons: on the one hand, they are represented as dangerous individuals, who are to be scrupulously controlled, and on the other, they are represented as vulnerable and fragile persons, to be paternalistically safeguarded. Even when local-level membership statuses do not act as limits on the movement of individuals, they therefore still evidently condition the life of the same, constituting administrative confines which, beyond obstructing the exercise of rights, promote a negative image of certain social categories.

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Index1

A

C

Accumulation, 59–65, 76, 89, 248 Administrative borders, 6, 10, 169–195, 205–234 Administrative devices, 182, 191 Administrative discretion, 10, 191–195 Administrative separation, 211–215

Capitalism, 33, 40, 60–63, 69, 75, 77, 89, 247, 248 Census, 25, 28, 45, 46n4, 81–84, 89, 103, 104, 106, 111, 112, 116, 143, 220, 221, 232–234 Chain of command of registration, 149–154 Citizenship, 5, 6, 9, 11, 14, 15, 19–23, 25, 31–37, 44, 46n3, 53–91, 124, 149, 153, 161n5, 172, 205, 213, 214, 222, 226, 228–232, 243, 244 Civic integration, 230 Civic stratification, 6, 9, 33, 34, 57, 59, 63, 66, 67, 71, 234

B

Borders, 4, 6, 9, 10, 13–45, 53–91, 103, 108, 140, 155, 169–195, 205–234, 249 Bureaucratic inscription, 26, 29, 247 Bureaucratic procedures, 149, 191

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2021 E. Gargiulo, Invisible Borders, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53836-1

273

274 Index

Civil registration, 2–4, 6–8, 10, 11, 28, 29, 38, 56, 57, 73, 84, 85, 103–105, 113–116, 118, 122–127, 129, 131n28, 135, 136, 138–142, 144–147, 149, 150, 153, 155, 157–159, 161n4, 161n6, 162n7, 169, 170, 173, 174, 182, 183, 185, 189, 192, 194, 196n8, 197n14, 198n23, 205–213, 215, 217–219, 221–223, 235n2, 235n3, 236n8, 243, 245–248 D

Differential inclusion, 7, 59–64, 210, 215, 228, 229, 234 Discrimination, 11, 32, 59, 66, 160, 184, 186, 197n16, 205, 212 Documents, 7, 8, 23, 30, 45, 46n5, 46n6, 46n7, 55, 74, 87, 124, 125, 137, 142, 144, 145, 147, 153, 154, 158, 160, 163n19, 194, 196n8, 220, 229–232 Domicile, 37, 78, 79, 84, 101–105, 107, 109–111, 115, 117–120, 125–128, 130n3, 130n8, 130n13, 135, 136, 139–141, 152, 157–160, 172, 184, 188, 215, 218, 232, 248 Dwelling, 92n3, 101–111, 113, 117, 118, 120–122, 126–129, 129n3, 135–138, 140–142, 146, 151, 154–157, 160, 161n5, 185, 187–189, 194, 196n8, 198n21, 215, 218, 232, 244

E

European citizenship, 5, 35, 53, 65, 91n2, 172 Exclusion, 5, 7–11, 20, 28, 32–35, 57–60, 63, 66, 114, 122, 173–189, 193–195, 197n9, 197n16, 205–210, 212, 213, 215, 218, 234, 246, 248 Expulsion, 55, 57, 59–61, 65, 66, 208–210, 220, 234–235n1, 235n2, 249 H

History of Italian civil registries, 170 Homeless, 4, 105, 106, 109, 110, 119, 120, 127, 128, 137, 152, 157 Housing Plan, 9, 116–122, 128, 185, 192, 193 Hukou system, 85, 226–228 I

ID cards, 229–231 Identification, 9, 23, 25, 27–30, 45, 46n6, 80, 81, 84, 116, 124, 136, 142, 196n8, 212, 220, 229–232, 247 Illegitimate denial of registration, 189, 190 Internal migrations, 143, 226, 229, 233 L

Laws against urbanisation, 85, 115, 143, 144, 173, 174 Legal exclusion, 57, 59, 60, 248

 Index 

Legal status, 4–7, 18, 33, 58, 59, 67–72, 74, 91, 214, 230, 231, 233, 234, 243, 244 Local (or urban) citizenship, 6, 9, 11, 53–91, 92n7, 228, 229, 231, 232, 243, 244 Location, 36, 102, 111, 116, 156, 229 Logic of registration, 143–149, 227 Lupi Decree, 121, 128, 154, 193

275

N

Neoliberalism, 63, 89 No fixed abode, 104–106 O

Ordinances, 7, 8, 41, 54, 76, 78, 175–190, 194, 195, 196n4, 196n8, 196–197n9, 197n10, 199n26, 206–208, 230, 236n8 P

M

Maroni decree, 179 Mechanisms of exclusion, 10, 186–189, 197n9, 206, 212, 213 Mechanisms of migration control, 32, 208, 233 Membership, 4–6, 9, 10, 16–24, 28–30, 32–37, 46n3, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59–61, 65, 66, 68–75, 88–91, 92n8, 101–111, 128, 149, 170, 214, 226, 229–232, 243, 244, 246, 247, 249 Membership statuses, 4, 5, 9, 10, 13–17, 24, 29, 32, 68, 88, 89, 229, 232, 243, 246, 249 Migrations, 32, 57, 65, 78, 91, 114, 143, 145, 164n24, 183, 208, 224, 226, 227, 229, 233 Monitoring, 2, 3, 7, 24, 45, 46n4, 73, 89, 115, 136, 154, 155, 160, 169, 221, 222, 233, 244–246, 249

Padrón municipal, 232 Passports, 30, 36, 74, 232 People, 1, 3, 7–9, 13–20, 23–26, 29, 35, 38, 41, 43–45, 58, 63, 77, 79, 82, 83, 85, 87, 88, 108, 113, 114, 116, 117, 120, 125, 173, 176, 184, 194, 196n1, 196n8, 221, 223, 224, 226–229, 231, 232, 234, 236n6, 246 Police, 31, 39–44, 46n8, 76, 78, 80–83, 86, 87, 124, 151, 161n4, 163n19, 175, 176, 178, 192, 194, 195, 196n8, 199n29, 208, 209, 217, 219, 229, 230, 232, 234, 236n5, 247, 249 Policing, 9, 39–45, 77, 78, 80, 82, 86 Population, 2–4, 9, 10, 14, 20, 24, 25, 27–30, 34–45, 58–60, 63, 66, 67, 73, 76, 78, 80–85, 89–91, 102–105, 107, 109–123, 125–127, 129, 129n2, 130n8, 130n9, 131n30, 136–138, 143–147,

276 Index

149, 150, 154, 161n5, 162n10, 169–174, 179, 182, 184–186, 190–193, 195, 196n1, 206, 209, 211–213, 222, 227, 229, 244, 245 Population design, 10, 191 R

Regime of statuses, 9, 63–68, 229 Registration, 1, 14, 56, 102, 135, 143–154, 169–174, 205, 243 Residency, 1–3, 5–11, 22, 23, 32, 37, 54, 57, 60, 71–73, 101–129, 135–160, 174–191, 193, 194, 197n10, 197n20, 198n24, 199n25, 205–219, 221–223, 226, 228, 230, 234n1, 243–249 Rights, 1, 14, 54, 105, 138–142, 173, 205, 243

Security Packages, 8, 117–119, 126–128, 180, 185, 192, 197n16 Selecting, 29–35, 65, 76, 91 Social control, 3, 149, 208, 234, 247 Social movements, 144, 224 Social rights, 2, 31, 56, 85, 88, 89, 209 Status, 1, 13–24, 53–60, 64–68, 103, 136, 172, 205, 243 Status borders, 4, 6, 7, 9, 13–17, 53, 54, 57, 60, 62, 63, 67, 212, 229, 249 Strategies of resistance, 223, 225 T

Temporary presence, 101 Territorial borders, 9, 13–17, 33 Territorial membership, 9, 16, 18–20, 22, 24, 53, 68, 69, 88, 101, 103 Territory, 1, 13, 17–24, 55, 103, 135, 171, 205, 243

S

Salvini Decree, 10, 124, 193, 195 Sanctuary cities, 71, 231

W

Welfare state, 32, 85–91