Senyo Dotsey

This chapter examines migrant homelessness in Italy, focusing on the role of third-sector organizations (TSOs) in responding to this issue. Migrants – among the poorest and most vulnerable groups in high-income countries – face heightened risks of homelessness due to structural, institutional, and individual factors. Italy's housing policies for (forced) migrants remain inadequate, relying heavily on temporary emergency measures and lacking post-reception housing pathways, thereby reinforcing precarity. Using Patronato San Vincenzo (PSV), a Catholic-led TSO in Bergamo, as a case study, the chapter analyses how such organizations provide essential shelter and operate as crucial first points of contact for diverse migrant groups. PSV's attempts to integrate homeless migrants into local housing systems reveal the significant gaps in state provisions and the compensatory function of TSOs. Overall, the study shows how fragmented, emergency-driven support structures shape migrants’ housing trajectories within Italy's socio-political landscape.

Legal precarity has been used to describe the relations between ‘space, law and persons’ that produce illegality and shape the sociolegal exclusion of forced migrants. Precarious legal status is demarcated by hierarchies of legal and social membership and degrees of exclusion. Within the context of legal precarity, we explore the coping strategies used by forced migrants preceding and during the COVID‐19 period in Italy. Our analysis focuses on interviews with 31 asylum claimants. We find that forced migrants experienced protracted legal liminality and precarity characterised by extended time spent in migration camps, unpredictable legal status determination, and, more broadly, imperfect knowledge. In particular, their legal precarity was formed or shaped by a fluctuating legal and bureaucratic system, the suspension of asylum determination processes, and the closure of institutions due to the COVID‐19 pandemic. The cumulative impact affected their well‐being and limited their full participation in society. This paper's key contribution is in identifying strategies employed in response. Individuals employed social network support, physical exercises, faith, and cognitive reframing of the legal difficulties to cope with prolonged precarious legal precarity. These findings have implications for migration scholarship and for professionals working with forced migrants, and can help inform policy and future research.

While some (progressive) cities have been proactive in forced migrants' reception and integration policy formulation, the central state is ultimately the chief architect of migration policy and the legal framework. Legal status considerably shapes all facets of forced migrants' lifeworlds and thus has significant implications for policy and integration. The Italian government has recently made significant changes to its migration system, affecting asylum‐seekers and refugees' legal status and subsequent city‐level integration efforts. This article thus investigates the interplay between asylum‐seekers' legal status, national migration policy framework and local integration programme. Employing the concept of legal uncertainty and qualitative exploration of a local integration project in Bergamo, it problematises the state's institutional production of uncertain and precarious migration status and how this shapes the prospects of asylum‐seekers' integration processes. It is shown that the city's efforts to integrate asylum‐seekers, starting from their arrival, are stifled by the national migration legal framework.

The role of the ethnic economy in immigrant arrival and adaptation has been studied extensively with regard to unskilled or low-skilled migrants. However, their role and function for skilled migrants is less well understood. This research explores the use of ethnic economies for 20 Italian skilled migrants in Britain during the cost-of-living crisis (2021–2022). Our research offers two key insights. First, we find that skilled migrants utilize the ethnic economy within London to secure housing and employment. In line with experiences of low-skilled laborers, skilled migrants are limited in their ability to improve their economic or social position due to employment conditions. Yet, we find their dependence on the ethnic economy in this case was undone by the unusual extension of social welfare during COVID-19 to migrants. The British government provided furlough—80% payment in lieu of working—to all eligible workers in the country. This contravenes their normal ‘hostile environment’ policies toward migrants, which exclude them from accessing public funds. Their inclusion in this program allowed Italian skilled migrants the time necessary to invest in capital acquisition through education and network building. This was, in turn, leveraged into better-paying work that matched their skills outside the ethnic economy.

The pandemic has had an unequal impact on the lives of Italian citizens. Italy, one of the worst-affected countries in Europe, has seen the most vulnerable and marginalized populations among the hardest hit by the pandemic’s secondary effects. The various intersecting forms of vulnerability, risk, and precarity have significantly affected the lives of Italian migrants. Evidence from 25 semi-structured interviews and conversations with social workers who work with migrants and various migrant groups, including naturalized citizens, EU long-term residents, and work permit holders, show that they face various livelihood problems, including employment precarity. It is argued that possessing a stable legal status does not automatically ensure access to welfare benefits, secure, reliable, high-quality, and permanent employment, nor does it exempt individuals from exploitative experiences in the job market, especially during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, due to systemic structural inequality and barriers.

This article examines how the COVID-19 pandemic exposed and intensified global inequalities, particularly through the lens of vaccine distribution, thereby challenging the ideals of global citizenship. While the pandemic highlighted humanity’s interconnectedness and shared vulnerability, the unequal access to vaccines and resources revealed enduring structural disparities between nations. Drawing on a review of the existing literature from three national contexts, this study critiques the limitations of global citizenship as a framework for addressing such inequalities. In response, it proposes “glo-ubuntu citizenship”—a reimagined concept rooted in African philosophy and the idea of shared humanity—as a more culturally grounded and ethically responsive approach. This model blends the global and local dimensions of citizenship while emphasizing solidarity and mutual care. The article argues that while glo-ubuntu citizenship is not without its challenges, it holds greater potential than conventional models for fostering equity in global health governance and guiding more inclusive responses to future crises.

Over the last three decades, the once-distinct terms ‘asylum’ and ‘immigration’ have become conceptually intertwined. This process is almost complete in Europe, where politicians, media, the public, and even academia often speak of these concepts interchangeably. Blurring these concepts has implications for migratory people: it removes legal rights borne by the state and diminishes the claims of humanitarian protection seekers within these movements. We have simultaneously witnessed the recategorization and reinterpretation of the statuses of vulnerable populations on the move, using geolegality to exclude them from otherwise legally entitled protections. We speak to the problems with narrowing the eligibility for protection through geolegality while simultaneously contributing to conceptual indistinction between people that discredits their identities as rights bearers. This short essay reflects on the ethical dilemmas of language use by researchers in shaping and contributing to this situation.