Da minori a Ir/regolari. Pratiche della temporaneità tra giovani migranti Maghrebini (Torino, Italia; Khouribga, Marocco)

This dissertation addresses the condition of ir/regular migrant and how this condition is generated within the field of contemporary Italian immigration policies. The research begins from the case of unaccompanied minors and an overview of EU level regulations to analyze the processes of constructing this specific temporary and reversible subjectivity, which is vulnerable to potentially sliding back into irregularity. The sites in which I conducted research are frontier urban spaces that distinguish between citizens and non-citizens while at the same time representing sought-after spheres; they are zones that enable migrants to define the new boundary they need to reassert or invent a new identity or social role or to position themselves within a given system. The ethnographic data were collected in Turin (2010-2015), an urban setting characterized by a longstanding population of Moroccan immigrants from the mining city of Khouribga, where I conducted a component of my multi-sited ethnography (2007 and 2011). This specific chain migration emerged following 1970s crisis in phosphate production. Since Italian immigration law introduced the legal figure of unaccompanied minor in1998, so-called harrâga (those who burn), solo minors and young men, began to emigrate from Khouribga to take the place of their fathers, who had come to Italy previously. Over time, repeated legislative oscillations between inclusion and exclusion have produced ambiguous legal effects on the status of young migrants. These factors give rise to unstable life conditions and shifts in models of masculinity from one generation to the next. By analyzing their life stories, the research finds that what is at stake in the migratory process goes beyond the possibility of settling down in one place; indeed, it is also about the opportunity to remain mobile at all costs. Mobility as an element of differentiation allows these young men to define themselves as “modern subjects.” My examination of their processes of learning to be adults, constructing kinship ties and re-appropriating urban spaces reveals the creativity inherent in these practices of challenging everyday uncertainty. By playing with the dominant social order, their practices of temporariness uncover the limits of both norms and associated systems of thought. In conclusion, this exploration of the intersection of migration processes and governmentality applied to the passage from unaccompanied minor to adult migrant sheds light on the specific liminal condition of ir/regularity: an uncertain status that these subjects, who are never completely constructed within the system, continually seek to manipulate. The lives of young ir/regular migrants illustrate the socially and politically constructed nature of age and kinship as well as inhabitation. At the same time, they also show how these very semantic borders give rise to autopoietic practices in response to changes in the policies governing contemporary migration.