The weak ring of the chain: immigrants facing the economic crisis in Italy.

The weak ring of the chain: immigrants facing the economic crisis in Italy The current economic crisis, which affected all the developed countries, has deeply affected economic productivity also in Italy. The unemployment rate changes rapidly and tends to increase, while the job market becomes more and more selective The immigrants are one of the first categories to be deeply affected by the crisis, with marked differences among the most developed regions (most of all the ones in Northern and Central Italy), and the least developed ones (as the ones in Southern Italy). Within every region, though, there are noticeable differences between metropolitan areas, manufacturing districts, tourist districts, agricultural districts and marginal areas. The Italian legislation on immigration, moreover, closely relates the permit to reside in the country to the possess of a regular job contract. Many immigrants lost their job in the last years, and many of them had to move to other destinations both in Italy and abroad or to re-orient their professional activity. Some of them, in order to avoid the risk of becoming illegal residents in Italy and facing new difficulties in re-entering the job market, chose to go back to their countries of origin. A new form of return migration was therefore started by the economic crisis. Our paper tries to offer a glimpse over the forced change in the migration projects that took place in the different Italian contexts. Given the difficulty of obtaining precise and updated statistical data about the shift in professional activities and about the returns of migrants to their countries of origin, we use mainly updated reports from a few selected research institutions (such Caritas-Migrantes, CENSIS, Fondazione ISMU, Fondazione Leone Moressa, ) together with journalistic sources. In particular, we will try to identify what are the relevant elements that affect the perception of the image of the destination country and are caused by the new economic situation and by the increased competition in entering the national job market. We will also briefly mention in our analysis the role that media discourses and the political ideology (the so called “mediascapes” and “ideoscapes”, to use Arjun Appadurai’s terms – Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis-London, Minnesota University Press, 1996) have in encouraging return migration, by reinforcing negative stereotypes, racial discrimination, the “fear of the other”, and other successful electoral campaigns targeted at making immigrants potential scapegoats for the economic crisis.