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43 Chapter 2 On Belonging in/to Italy and Europe Citizenship, Race, and the “Immigration Problem” Flavia Stanley This chapter looks at the meanings and notions conveyed by the keywords “citizenship,” “nationality,” and “race” in transnational Europe and in Italy. While movements of people across national borders are certainly not new phenomena, many academics have noted that current trends in transnational migration have had the effect of creating more ethnic diversity in countries not usually host to permanent settlements of immigrants. The discourses surrounding nationality and citizenship cast transnational populations into the disparate categories of national, citizen and noncitizen. In Italy, those who look and act “Italian ” are assumed to be citizens whereas those who look and act “other” are assumed to be noncitizens. Thus the use of “national” as a category is utilized to denote difference in what it means to “be” Italian, whereas the category of citizen refers to those who deserve the privileges allotted to them for “being Italian.” “Italianness,” then, is more than a cultural identity; it also implies a political and legal belonging not automatically ascribed to the non-Italian and non-European immigrant. This distinction has serious implications for the immigrant resident. Examples from fieldwork conducted in Rome are used to posit that the process of citizenship making in Europe and in Italy is participatory in the creation and protection of racial privilege. In the past twenty years, Italy has become host to an unprecedented number of immigrants and transitioned from a nation of emigration to one of immigration. Italian citizens grapple with fears about the very future of Italy and “Italianness” prompted in part by demographers, the media, and politicians, citing, for example, the nation’s record-low birth rate. In 44 F l av i a S ta n l e y addition, Italy faces the pressure to comply with the demands and responsibilities of participating in the European Union. These tensions and anxieties regarding changing demographics and transnational global flows have pushed issues of national identity and immigration policy into the forefront of heated political and social debate. In general, despite the fact that immigrants consist of no more than 3.5 percent of the entire population (Castles and Miller 2003: 244), the issue of immigration is often cast as an unequivocal (and perhaps irresoluble) problem by the popular media, one that poses a threat not only to Italy and “Italianness” but also to Europe and “Europeanness.” For example, Elizabeth Krause (2001: 595) notes that the low birth rate of Italians is often juxtaposed in media reports against the growing non-European immigrant population and becomes linked to fears about the demise of the Italian “race” and to the disappearance of European culture. Nicola Mai (2002: 77) reports that in a 1991 poll of Italians regarding immigration, 78 percent of respondents stated that the number of foreign immigrants was too high while only 43 percent of those surveyed were aware of the actual dimensions of foreign migration. Where does the disjuncture between “real” numbers and public opinion come from? What kinds of fears and beliefs are provoked by the presence of immigrants in “Italian” space and where are ideas about immigrants formed? To get at some of these questions, I discuss some of the larger political and geographic changes in Europe and reflect on my fieldwork to get at a more nuanced understanding of how ideas about immigration in Italy are learned and reproduced. Destination Europe Unpacking the positioning of immigration as a threat may yield clues to current shifting notions of national (and transnational) identities, as member countries of the European Union respond to pressures of sustaining boundaries “in a world ever more open to cultural flows” (Foster 1991: 237; see also Ong 1999). In the context of Europe, immigrants “are often distinct from the receiving populations [with] the position of immigrants marked by a specific legal status, that of the foreigner or non-citizen . . . [with] differences between groups often summed up in the concepts of ethnicity and race” (Castles and Miller 2003: 14). The “imagined community” of the nation-state is typically realized through the invention of traditions (Anderson 1983; Hobsbawm 1983) that create illusions of unity among people via language, history, and culture. Phil Marfleet (1999) notes that national identity is usually a “construction of the ruling elite” (18) and that the project of nation building creates powerful national myths. One effect of this is that immigration and ethnic diversity threaten ideas of nationhood as...

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