“You can see it in his eyes that he is willing to work". The ambivalent use of work in promoting integration for migrants. A case study from Northern Italy

This article presents and analyses the use of work in promoting integration for asylum seekers and refugees in Lombardy (North of Italy). The research materials, collected from a larger research project involving asylum-seekers, refugees, professionals, and researchers, highlight how two main discourses operate in complementary fashion in integration practices based on career guidance and traineeships. Work is on the one hand a potential enabling factor that allows migrants to enter a relational space based on solidarity but, at the same time, it may represent a barrier, filtering out those who are welcome and those who are not. These two effects intersect, depending on a multiplicity of factors embedded in the institutional integration system. Narratives collected on this network will be used to explore how mechanisms of recognition and exclusion are related not only to an economic logic but to values connected to a certain kind of work culture. This is a dimension that is often neglected by social operators whose practices are continuously exposed to the risk of constructing, unconsciously, the “integrable” migrant.