Cosa significa l'integrazione? Quando a rispondere sono gli immigrati

Abstract

In the paper we demonstrate that the analysis of the integration processes requires taking into account not only ‘objective’ indicators, such as employment, living conditions, legal status and language skills, but also the biographical experiences of migrants - before, during and after the transition - as well as their own understanding of the notion of integration. We recognise the fact that the ‘objective’ and subjective definitions of integration do not necessarily coincide, therefore they need to be confronted. In order to include in our analysis the subjective perspective of immigrants, we conducted 16 narrative interviews with men and women coming from Ukraine, Sri Lanka and Senegal who have been living in Naples for a significant period of time (at least nine years). The choice of this particular method was meant not only to provide time and space for the immigrants to share their experiences, to “give them the voice”, but also to facilitate the expression of their agency. In fact, in the autobiographical narratives the levels of agency and structure are linked as individual projects are presented in broader social and institutional contexts, where they can be realised or blocked. The analysis of the collected narratives has showed a pragmatic approach towards integration, deeply rooted in the immigrants’ life projects. To our initial surprise, in many cases the topic of ‘integration’ was not picked up easily. The word itself was not familiar to our interviewees and the concern about rights and citizenship would not be a part of their everyday reflection. Instead of the notion of integration as we know it from migration studies or from political discourse, our analysis found out an idea of integration as ‘good life’. To be integrated, according to our interviewees’ means to have a job, a decent place to live, to be surrounded by family and friends, to be accepted and to feel free. The modesty of these expectations may be explained by temporarisation: migration tends to be viewed as a transitory phase of our interviewees’ lives. Temporarisation makes the limitations encountered in the country of destination easier to accept and the discussions on rights and citizenship less relevant. The main reference points of the people interviewed were not here and now but their past (often marked by poverty thus the current satisfaction and emphasis on ‘good life’) and their future in an unknown destination or in their countries of origin (thus the concern about Italian citizenship less pronounced). We also demonstrate here how much the meaning of integration differs if we take it as a theoretical construct, a social policy goal and a lived experience of the immigrants. Viewed for the bottom-up perspective, integration has first of all a pragmatic character as it is not that much a matter of becoming “one of us” but it is about the possibility of realising the projects of ‘good life’, where individual agency and structural context play equally important roles.

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ORCID for Markieta Domecka: orcid.org/0000-0001-8020-3075

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