The prism of new mobilities. The mobility trajectories of refugees and asylum seekers outside the Italian reception system

Abstract

ABSTRACT For over twenty years, Italy has faced the phenomenon of so-called “forced” international migrations. By virtue of its geographic position in the Mediterranean, this country constitutes, in many cases, the first landing and the transit country for asylum seekers in their flight from wars, political crises, environmental catastrophes and depletion of resources. This also implied a growing number of “rejections” that is, asylum seekers to whom no form of protection was grantedand are unlikely to return to their country of origin. A segment of them represents an intense geographic mobility or, better to say, multiple mobilities that intersect and fuel each other.Scholars have mostly explored the trajectories of mobility of the native people or so-called “economic migrants”. Much more rarely, refugees and asylum seekers have been perceived and framed as mobile subjects, protagonists of multiple and plural geographic, social, and migration movements.Therefore, this editorial and the whole Special Issue focus on the social changes that are reshaping migration scenarios, with particular attention paid to the paths of international and national mobility of refugees and asylum seekers outside the reception system, as well as their geographical, social and migration trajectories.Specifically, after introducing the topic, this paper, on the one hand, reconstructs the framework of Italian asylum policies, progressively more restrictive and discriminatory and destined to become a model for the entire European Union, analyzing the impact of the legal system and migration policies on the construction of the material and labor vulnerability of migrants and their exploitation within the national labor market. On the other hand, it deepens and reconstructs the theoretical perspectives on the phenomenon of mobility, the intersection between spatial dimension and temporal dimensions. Particular attention is paid to the pandemic and to the sociological interpretations of this phenomenon, the “mirror function” that it performs within society and the global migration scenario, the instrumental uses that have been made of this crisis in the political, economic, legal and social fields and the impact it has had on the common ethnographic and research practices shared by the papers that make up the Special Issue. Finally, the Editorial present the structure of the Special Issue and the contents of the articles, organized according to coherent theoretical and empirical path, aimed at illuminating all the facets of the “prism of new mobility”.