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MIGRATION,
DIASPORAS AND
CITIZENSHIP

Migration, Borders
and Citizenship
Between Policy
and Public Spheres
Edited by
Maurizio Ambrosini
Manlio Cinalli · David Jacobson
Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship

Series Editor
Olga Jubany
Department of Social Anthropology
Universitat de Barcelona
Barcelona, Spain
For over twenty years, the Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship series
has contributed to cross-disciplinary empirical and theoretical debates on
migration processes, serving as a critical forum for and problematising
the main issues around the global movement and circulation of people.
Grounded in both local and global accounts, the Series firstly focuses on
the conceptualisation and dynamics of complex contemporary national
and transnational drivers behind movements and forced displacements.
Secondly, it explores the nexus of migration, diversity and identity,
incorporating considerations of intersectionality, super-diversity, social
polarization and identification processes to examine migration through
the various intersections of racialized identities, ethnicity, class, gender,
age, disability and other oppressions. Thirdly, the Series critically engages
the emerging challenges presented by reconfigured borders and
boundaries: state politicization of migration, sovereignty, security, trans-
border regulations, human trade and ecology, and other imperatives that
transgress geopolitical territorial borders to raise dilemmas about con-
temporary movements and social drivers.

More information about this series at


http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14044
Maurizio Ambrosini · Manlio Cinalli ·
David Jacobson
Editors

Migration, Borders
and Citizenship
Between Policy and Public Spheres
Editors
Maurizio Ambrosini Manlio Cinalli
Department of Social and Political Sciences CEVIPOF
University of Milan Sciences Po
Milan, Italy Paris, France
Department of Social and Political Sciences
David Jacobson
University of Milan
Department of Sociology
Milan, Italy
University of South Florida
Tampa, FL, USA

ISSN 2662-2602 ISSN 2662-2610 (electronic)


Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship
ISBN 978-3-030-22156-0 ISBN 978-3-030-22157-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22157-7

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse
of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by
similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt
from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the
authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained
herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with
regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover image: © CarolLynn Tice/Alamy Stock Photo

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements

This book was born out of our research interest in intersecting the fields
of migration, borders and citizenship, and on which the editors of this
collection have been working throughout their careers. This personal
interest led to a series of research programmes funded by national and
international institutions, allowing for development of personal net-
works and research findings that are the basis for this book. Indeed, we
have been very fortunate to reinforce a network of scholars spanning
various countries, in Europe and the United States, for the delivery of
this book.
We thank Sciences Po Paris and the University of Milan for support-
ing the original workshop on “solidarity, migration, borders and citi-
zenship” (title of workshop: Retour des frontières ou ‘Global Seam’? Une
réflexion sur la solidarité transnationale, les droits, et la citoyenneté au
temps de la crise migratoire en Europe) in Menton, where the contributors
to this edited collection gathered in June 2017. The EU H2020 project
TransSOL (“European paths to transnational solidarity at times of crisis:
conditions, forms, role-models and policy response”; grant agreement
no. 649435) is gratefully acknowledged for funding part of the work-
shop. Our special thanks go to Bernard El Ghoul, Director at Sciences

v
vi      Acknowledgements

Po Menton, for hosting us just one mile away from the controversial
Franco-Italian border of Menton-Ventimiglia, one primary geographical
symbol of migration crisis in Europe.
Contents

1 The Politics of Borders and the Borders of Politics:


A Conceptual Framework 1
Maurizio Ambrosini, Manlio Cinalli and David Jacobson

2 From Borders to Seams: The Role of Citizenship 27


Manlio Cinalli and David Jacobson

3 Borders and Migrations: The Fundamental


Contradictions 47
Catherine Wihtol de Wenden

4 “Today We March, Tomorrow We Vote!”:


Contested Denizenship, Immigration Federalism,
and the Dreamers 61
Jamie Goodwin-White

5 ‘Solidarity Crime’ at the Border: A Lesson from France 89


Olivia Müller

vii
viii      Contents

6 Solidarities in Transit on the French–Italian Border:


Ethnographic Accounts from Ventimiglia
and the Roya Valley 109
Luca Giliberti and Luca Queirolo Palmas

7 Border Troubles: Medical Expertise in the Hotspots 141


Jacopo Anderlini

8 The Two Dimensions of the Border: An Empirical


Study France–Italy 163
Carlo De Nuzzo

9 The Local Governance of Immigration and Asylum:


Policies of Exclusion as a Battleground 195
Maurizio Ambrosini

10 The Border(s) Within: Formal and Informal


Processes of Status Production, Negotiation
and Contestation in a Migratory Context 217
Paola Bonizzoni

11 Cities of Exclusion: Are Local Authorities


Refusing Asylum Seekers? 237
Chiara Marchetti

12 Symbolic Laws, Street-Level Actors: Everyday


Bordering in Dutch Participation Declaration
Workshops 265
Barbara Oomen and Emma Leenders

13 Research on Migration, Borders and Citizenship:


The Way Ahead 295
Maurizio Ambrosini, Manlio Cinalli and David Jacobson

Index 307
Notes on Contributors

Maurizio Ambrosini is Professor of Sociology of Migration at the


University of Milan, Department of Social and Political Sciences,
and chargé d’enseignement at the university of Nice-Sophia Antipolis
(France). He is also the editor of the journal Mondi Migranti, and the
Director of the Italian Summer School of Sociology of Migrations, in
Genoa. His handbook, Sociologia delle migrazioni, is adopted as the text-
book in many Italian universities. In English he has published Irregular
Migration and Invisible Welfare (Palgrave, 2013) and recently Irregular
Immigration in Southern Europe—Actors, Dynamics and Governance
(Palgrave, 2018). His articles have been published in several leading
international journals.
Jacopo Anderlini is a Ph.D. candidate in Social Sciences at the
University of Genoa, Department of Education Studies (DISFOR). His
main research themes are migrations, specifically border and refugee
studies; and social movements, adopting mainly qualitative methods.
Recently he has focused on the changes in the governance of mobility
in the European Union, in particular on the employment of new border
technologies and the management of asylum seekers in Italy.

ix
x      Notes on Contributors

Paola Bonizzoni is Associate Professor at the Department of Social


and Political Sciences at the University of Milan, where she teaches
“Society and Social Change” and “Globalization and Social Divisions”.
In her research, she has explored several aspects of the immigration phe-
nomenon, with a recent focus on the social implication of immigra-
tion-related controls. Her recent publications include: “Looking for the
Best and Brightest? Deservingness Regimes in Italian Labour Migration
Management” (in International Migration, 2018) and “The Shifting
Boundaries of (un)Documentedness: A Gendered Understanding of
Migrants’ Employment-Based Legalization Pathways in Italy” (in Ethnic
and Racial Studies, 2016).
Manlio Cinalli is Professor of Sociology at the University of Milan
and Associate Research Director at CEVIPOF (CNRS—UMR 7048),
Sciences Po Paris. He has taught and conducted research at various
leading universities and institutes across Europe and the United States,
including Columbia University, the EUI, the University of Oxford, and
the École Française de Rome. He has many large grant awards and has
published widely on citizenship and political integration. His research
relies on a multidisciplinary approach that combines contentious poli-
tics, political behaviour, and policy studies.
Carlo De Nuzzo is a Ph.D. student at Sciences Po Paris with a thesis
entitled: The Triangle of Citizenship. A Comparison between France and
Italy, from the Rise of Mass Society to the Maastricht Treaty 1870–1992.
He holds a Masters in History from Università di Milano where he is
a tutor. Carlo has worked as assistant researcher at The Keynes Centre
in Cork, at Strathclyde University in Glasgow and at the University of
San Andrés in Buenos Aires. He is also vice president of the Groupe
d’Etudes Géopolitiques (GEG), a think tank at the Ecole Normale
Supérieure. Carlo’s research interests include: history of citizenship, his-
tory of ideas, fascisms, history of art.
Catherine Wihtol de Wenden is Director of Research at CNRS
(CERI). For 30 years she has researched international migration from
a Political Science and Public Law approach. She studied at Sciences Po
Paris and University Paris I (Panthéon- Sorbonne). She has published
Notes on Contributors      xi

20 books and many articles. Currently she teaches at Sciences Po, at the
University La Sapienza and LUISS in Rome. She has been President of
the Research Committee Migration of the International Sociological
Association (ISA) from 2002 to 2008 and serves as an expert for sev-
eral international organisations (UNHCR, Council of Europe and
European Commission). She received the Chevalier de la legion d’ho-
neur in 2014 and the médaille d’honneur du CNRS in 2017.
Luca Giliberti is a Ph.D. student who conducts sociological research at
the University of Genoa (DISFOR—Laboratory for Visual Sociology)
and at the University of Côte d’Azur (URMIS). He is a fellow at the
“French Collaborative Institute on Migration” (POLICY Department),
where he is the Principal Investigator of the project, “Observatory of
Border Territories”. He is Adjunct Professor of Sociology at Sciences
Po Menton. His research interests are transnational migrations, bor-
ders, racialization and resistance practices in urban and rural areas. He
has published numerous articles in national and international scientific
journals, as well as essays in collective volumes and a research book.
Jamie Goodwin-White is Associate Professor in Geography at
the University of California, Los Angeles, and an affiliate of the
California Center for Population Research. She previously held posi-
tions in Migration Studies, Geography, and Social Statistics at Oxford,
University College Dublin, as well as at the University of Sussex, and
the University of Southampton. Her research focuses on immigration
and critical citizenship, considering how immigrant and second-genera-
tion integration and social mobility are conditioned by unequal labour
markets and legal contexts. Additional work of hers focuses on eco-
nomic inequality by gender and race/ethnicity, internal migration, and
distributional methods.
David Jacobson is Professor of Sociology at the University of South
Florida. He was Fulbright Research Fellow at the Peace Research
Institute Oslo (PRIO), 2017–18, during his work on this volume. He
works in the areas of immigration and citizenship, human rights, reli-
gion and conflict, and borders and global seams. Professor Jacobson is
an author of, among other works, Rights Across Borders: Immigration
xii      Notes on Contributors

and the Decline of Citizenship, and Of Virgins and Martyrs: Woman’s


Status in Global Conflict. He has had visiting appointments at the
Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, Hebrew University, Sciences Po,
and at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). He has led and co-led
grant projects in Western Europe, West Africa and Southeast Asia. His
work has featured in the New York Times, France 2 television, Salon.
com, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Tages Anzeiger, Australian Broadcasting
Corporation, the Nation, La Croix, Foreign Policy, Haaretz, Sonntags
Zeitung and other media outlets.
Emma Leenders studies International and European Politics (M.Sc.)
at the University of Edinburgh. Her wider research interests relate to
power, identity and migration. She previously completed her under-
graduate degree (magna cum laude) in Liberal Arts and Sciences with
a major in Social Sciences at the University College Roosevelt/Utrecht
University. Working as a research assistant at the Cities of Refuge pro-
ject, she was able to extend her undergraduate thesis on the participa-
tion declaration in The Netherlands.
Chiara Marchetti is Professor of Sociology of Intercultural Relations at
the University of Milan. She is among the founders of the Coordinated
Research Center Escapes Laboratorio di studi critici sulle migrazioni
forzate, and is part of the editorial staff of the Mondi Migranti. Her
research activities concern the issues of international migration, with
particular attention to asylum and forced migrations, and the role of the
third sector in the integration of asylum seekers and refugees.
Olivia Müller is Ph.D., Doctor of Law. While at Paris 1 Panthéon
Sorbonne University and Nantes University, she studied the criminalisa-
tion applied to migrants in France and Italie and European Union laws.
She works now as a reporter focused on migration topics and French
suburbs for Radio France and various magazines.
Barbara Oomen holds a chair in the Sociology of Human Rights at
University College Roosevelt/Utrecht University. She leads the Cities of
Refuge research program, a large inquiry into the role of human rights
in how local authorities welcome and integrate refugees throughout
Europe, which is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific
Notes on Contributors     xiii

Research (www.citiesofrefuge.eu). Her wider research focuses upon


the mechanisms by which rights become realities. Recent publications
include an edited volume Global Urban Justice: The Rise of Human
Rights Cities (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Frontier Cities:
The Rise of Local Authorities as an Opportunity for International Human
Rights Law (EJIL, 2018).
Luca Queirolo Palmas is Professor of Sociology of Migration and
Visual Sociology at the University of Genoa. Co-director of Mondi
Migranti, Journal of Studies and Research on International Migrations, he
also founded the Laboratory for Visual Sociology devoted to spreading
visual forms of narrative and research in social sciences. He directed sev-
eral European projects on gangs, youth cultures and migrations. He has
been visiting professor in Barcelona, Quito, Paris and Tunis. His lastest
book, with Luisa Stagi, is After Revolution. Youth Landscape and Gender
Gazes in Contemporary Tunisia (Verona, Ombre Corte, 2017).
List of Figures

Chapter 2
Fig. 1 States-system as a multicentric world 35
Fig. 2 Networks intersecting across states 36

Chapter 6
Fig. 1 Page from La Bolla by Emanuele Giacopetti
(La Bolla is a graphic novel by Emanuele Giacopetti,
recounting the Presidio No Borders experience, produced
by Graphic News) 117
Fig. 2 Page from La Bolla, by Emanuele Giacopetti 120
Fig. 3 Shebab under the bridge in Ventimiglia: scenes of daily life 122
Fig. 4 Délinquants Solidaires banner 131
Fig. 5 Area for rest and socialisation at Cédric Herrou’s campsite 131
Fig. 6 At Cédric Herrou’s campsite, map of France:
routes for requesting asylum 135

xv
List of Tables

Chapter 11
Table 1 Comparison between asylum requests and SPRAR capacity 238
Table 2 Distribution among different reception facilities 241
Table 3 Characteristics of the Italian reception system 243
Table 4 Local authorities refusing asylum seekers 248

Chapter 12
Table 1 Comparing municipalities 281

xvii
1
The Politics of Borders and the Borders
of Politics: A Conceptual Framework
Maurizio Ambrosini, Manlio Cinalli and David Jacobson

1 Introduction: Migration, Borders


and Citizenship
Migration has been the focus national and international debate owing
to its unsettling impact on the main tenets of Western democracies,
such as regulated borders and citizenship. Of late, the interdependent
relationship between migration, borders and citizenship has become
especially accentuated. This increased attention is due to the perceived

M. Ambrosini (*) · M. Cinalli


Department of Social and Political Sciences,
University of Milan, Milan, Italy
e-mail: maurizio.ambrosini@unimi.it
M. Cinalli
e-mail: manlio.cinalli@unimi.it
D. Jacobson
Department of Sociology,
University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA
e-mail: djacobson@usf.edu
© The Author(s) 2020 1
M. Ambrosini et al. (eds.), Migration, Borders and Citizenship, Migration, Diasporas
and Citizenship, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22157-7_1
2    
M. Ambrosini et al.

contradiction between the need to come together internationally for


managing migration (mostly through regional and international agree-
ments and policies), vis-a-vis the revival of sovereigntist agendas that
are hostile to surrendering any control over the entry of aliens. The
‘migration crisis’ has prompted a large body of literature dealing with
the emergence of Trumpism, Brexit and various neo-nationalist move-
ments, on the mismatch between a transnational legal framework and
the expression of identities that remain territorially bounded.
At the same time, long-term processes of migration have laid bare the
romantic fiction of the ‘nation-state’ as established throughout the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries. Western democracies are faced with a
process in which migration endlessly changes the ‘nation’, to such an
extent that they must allow for continuous transformation of foreigners
into citizens not only as equal individuals under the rule of law, but also
as bearers of their own claims that permeate the nation itself, whatever
the recipe (salad-bowl, melting-pot, interculturalism, and the like).
The supposedly deleterious impact of migration on borders and cit-
izenship has thus stood out as the “ultimate security threat” (Léonard
2010: 231), nurturing a growing demand for national security
(Newman 2006). The surveillance of borders, the identification of
migrants and the selection of those admitted to the national commu-
nity, have gained acute attention among policy-makers and the general
public. Security concerns have mixed in with the regulation of inter-
national migration (Faist 2002), and they have elevated the control
of migration to the highest priority among state policies in this field
(Balibar 2012). Recent scholarship has emphasised the multiplication
and complexification of borders (Balibar 2012); their relocation, dis-
semination and modification (Agier 2014); their ‘denaturalization’
through the endowment with technological apparatus (Dijstelbloem
and Broeders 2015); and their evolution towards remote and virtual
forms of control (Tsianos and Karakayali 2010). Borders are seen as
the last redoubt for national sovereignty (Opeskin 2012: 551), while
“neo-nationalism” increasingly informs international relations, enhanc-
ing the ability of states to control migration (Schain 2009). This com-
mon trend across Europe and the United States is also evident in the
externalization of migration controls, which establish agreements to
1 The Politics of Borders and the Borders of Politics …    
3

engage countries of origin and transit to control migration (Lavenex


2006). In this light it suffices to mention the European agreements with
Turkey, Niger and Libya, or the Programme Frontera Sur between the
United States and Mexico.
While the proliferation of fences and walls to fortify borders in nearly
every part of the world shows the growing accentuation of national
boundaries and the associated policy investments to oppose migration
and the production of ‘new citizenship’ (Cinalli 2017), the border at the
centre of this book is not just a border in its prosaic sense—in as much
as citizenship is not taken in the narrow function of territorial member-
ship. Rather, borders and citizenship in the migration ‘field’ occupy the
key interface between the policy sphere—where the main institutional
actors and political elites engage in decision-making—and the public
sphere—where movements, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs),
and civil society engage in discussion over decision-making and its
actual practice (Cinalli 2004).
Accordingly, the notion of ‘field’ is crucial to comprehend this plu-
rality of positions, agents and discourses. Since the seminal studies
by Jacobson (1996), Sassen (1996) and Soysal (1995), we know that
human rights and democratic norms (either enshrined in international
conventions or in national constitutions) may hamper the practicing of
harsh policies in the public sphere, in as much as bottom-up mobiliza-
tion by movements, NGOs and civil society may hamper restrictions by
norms, institutions and policies (Gurowitz 1999). The contributions of
this book converge not only on postnational interaction across territo-
rial borders but, especially, focus on the field interactions across policy
and public spheres.
The extent to which policy and public spheres communicate (or not)
within the migration field allows for processes of multilevel governance,
pushing the policy-public divide upward toward intergovernmental and
downward towards grassroots politics at the local level (Hooghe and
Marks 2001). Thus, potential divergences across the policy and public
spheres may intersect with differences across territorial levels. This can
be expressed, for example, in increasing spaces of uncertainty when
local policies over bordering practices and protection of undocumented
migrants differ markedly from national policies (Oomen et al. 2016).
4    
M. Ambrosini et al.

As such, this book gives significant attention to multi-level interac-


tions across the local and the national level. As we will show, borders are
not only a concern at the national level, but they can also be established
and challenged at a local level. They are not only drawn and enforced
by public authorities, but they are in some way negotiated with a wide
range of social actors. Citizenship, in turn, is not a fact, but a process.
It does not only descend from above, but it is also negotiated from
below; it is not only a political institution, but a set of social practices.
Citizenship’s beneficiaries are not mere passive subjects of concessions
granted by the host state; rather, they are actively engaged in the pro-
cess of widening the legitimate social base of the society in which they
choose to join (Ambrosini 2013).
Simply put, migration obliges western democracies to reconsider sov-
ereignty over borders and citizenship. These democracies do so in the
context of responding to the continuous interactions across the local,
national and transnational level, including the interplay between insti-
tutions and decision-makers in the policy sphere and the civic practices
and discourses in the public sphere. In so doing, the book unpacks the
established function of borders as a fixed tool, which, by separating
migrants from (the territory of ) citizens, supposedly reinforces national
sovereignty (Balibar 2003).
At the same time, this book comprehends a whole field wherein fluid
and cross-level dynamics take place across the policy and public spheres.
Our conceptualisation of migration, borders, and citizenship as inter-
connected elements of the same field serves to bring together elites and
institutions side-by-side with civil society and the broader public. It is
thus propitious for the study of the plurality of structures, relations, and
agents who lead to a consensual field that pre-empts contentiousness
(Cinalli 2007) or, alternatively, to a ‘battleground’ that is open to differ-
ent outcomes (Ambrosini 2018; Fassin 2011). A detailed examination
of policy and public spheres across territorial levels gives proper light
to institutions, policy actors and state elites in general: decision-making
over migration, borders, and citizenship taps into the most traditional
prerogatives of national sovereignty, while also tapping into actual expe-
riences of solidarity and exchanges among movements, civil society, and
individual citizens themselves.
1 The Politics of Borders and the Borders of Politics …    
5

Our ultimate task is that of reconnecting the policy and public spheres
in a way to emphasize the variable dynamics linking institutions and
civil society within different forms of multilevel governance. This goal
fits ongoing studies of emerging forms of governance across the national
and the local level, including the involvement of grassroots public move-
ments ‘from below’ alongside decision-making by central policy elites and
institutions. No doubt, actors may aim to access different social positions
so as to strengthen their role in the dynamic renegotiation of bounda-
ries between the policy and public spheres. For example, central policy-­
makers may be interested in the support that grassroots public groups can
provide in terms of provision of services, production of knowledge and
public legitimisation, while grassroots public organizations, in exchange,
may obtain a privileged access to higher political positions and financial
resources (thereby playing a greater role in wider processes of governance).
Hence, our focus on multilevel dynamics across the policy and pub-
lic spheres facilitates the scrutiny of the main tensions and contradic-
tions in the migration field. For example, the fact migrants are usually
net contributors to pension systems (Razin and Sadka 2001) means that
restrictions over migration, borders and citizenship may conflict with
state interests such as the provision of an effective welfare and an effi-
cient communication across the national and the local level (Ambrosini
2018); or that the same restriction, albeit designed to counter criminal-
ity and violence, paradoxically ends up targeting civil society and soli-
darity mobilization rather than real acts of trafficking crime. This book
discusses these tensions and contradictions in depth.

2 Between Policy and Public Spheres


The book is divided into three primary parts, addressing migration,
borders, and citizenship in first, the policy sphere; second, the public
sphere; and third, the multilevel dynamics across the policy and public
spheres. While each part of the book can be read and understood in
its own terms, the three parts are a-piece in addressing how multi-level
governance highlights, and sometimes overcomes, tensions and contra-
dictions taking place across the policy and public spheres.
6    
M. Ambrosini et al.

2.1 Policy Sphere: The Impact of Citizenship Regimes,


Borders Politics, and Human Rights

The policy sphere has to address a particularly complex set of demands


and, in certain respects, even contradictions between contesting forces.
Not only are the main institutional parties, actors and elites in essence
responding not only to competing movements (some of which dif-
ferent policy elites may represent), NGOs and civil society in the
public sphere, but also to a variety of national and international con-
siderations. These include the growing international legal instruments
that may constrain their actions (notably regarding human rights in
areas of migration and refugees) and national constitutional and judi-
cial constrains (and occasionally enablers). Furthermore, transnational
and corporate actors also impress upon the policy elites their own inter-
ests, as well broader concerns of economy in a globalised economic
environment.
The postnational citizenship scholars, noted previously, brought
to the fore the growing impact of human rights—not only as a legal
regime but normatively in the extraordinary growth of human rights
norms in discourse, from court cases to social movements to everyday
claims. Other scholars have contested the postnational shift (Joppke
1999; Bloemraad 2006). However, what is clear is that various actors
are acting transnationally and through sets of claims that supersede
classic sovereigntist models. This is evident, to give one example, in the
dramatic growth of dual citizenship both in recognition by numerous
governments and in millions of new dual citizenship carriers since the
mid-1990s.
Conversely, devolving downward for the policy sphere, the geo-
graphic diffusion of bordering practices, especially via increased sub-
national immigration enforcement—or the local support for migrants
and refugees—of local authorities or states (in the United States) add an
additional constraint on the policy sphere.
The challenge for the policy sphere is not simply in the levels of inter-
ests impacting it from the public to the international. Rather, to take
the area of human rights, the public sphere itself is impacted directly by
international norms and legal instruments. These international norms
1 The Politics of Borders and the Borders of Politics …    
7

and instruments get expressed primarily through the public sphere


itself, through movements, NGOs and civic society embracing these
norms and instruments in their claims-making on the policy sphere.
Equally important, other actors and movements in the public sphere use
such international norms and instruments as a foil in promoting a more
sovereigntist and nationalist agenda.
The public sphere is, then, buffeted in a pincer-like fashion, navi-
gating a highly complex and frequently contradictory environment—­
reinforcing the contentious and often zero-sum trade offs of the
character of our politics, in this case in the field of migration. Yet we also
observe nuanced developments resulting from these multifold pressures
upon the policy sphere, including greater porousness in the politics of
borders and in the borders of politics. From export zones that seek to
mediate between sovereignty and a globalized economy to humanitar-
ian engagement (such as medical support) at the border, while trying to
control refugee and migrant flows, the policy sphere seeks to find a path
through a dense thicket—even if, more often than not, the policy sphere
responses to pressures are ad hoc and even crisis-driven.
The courts are more considered (also less accountable to the public
sphere), weaving international norms and civic and human rights with
national prerogatives; as such, they are part of a legal narrative, and nar-
rative-making. This makes them less prone (but not entirely immune)
from the ad hoc and even sudden about-turns of the broader policy
sphere or, for that matter, of public opinion. The judiciary, in profound
ways, sits at the seam of the politics of borders and, indeed, at the bor-
ders of politics; in this regard its role has been critical as an architect of
social and political change.

2.2 Public Sphere: The Bottom-Up Impact


of Mobilisation and Discourse

The second part of the book addresses the public sphere, by focus-
ing on the engagement of citizens and civil society. In particular, we
shed light on the bottom-up role of mobilisation and discourse with a
view to identifying different scenarios across the policy/public divide.
8    
M. Ambrosini et al.

Our main goal is to reconstruct the rich field of agency and exchanges
that strengthen a healthy public sphere. Far from being the exclusive
realm of restrictive institutions and policy elites, migration, borders,
and citizenship provide the ground for a large volume of organizations,
movements, independent actors and volunteers to nurture and engage
with norms of equality and solidarity. These groups may either oppose or
side with moderate national or more extreme neo-nationalist positions.
NGOs and other civil society actors have also acquired a growing
salience in migration policies owing to their provision of food, money,
shelter, medical care, and bureaucratic assistance (Castles 2002), but do
not necessarily enjoy a good reputation in the broader public and in the
academic discourse. For example, Fassin (2005: 382) recalls Agamben
(1998) saying that a main feature of contemporary biopolitics con-
sists in confusing the humanitarian and the political. The activity of
NGOs has even been treated as a part of the border security industry
(Andersson 2016). NGOs’ services for migrants can be viewed as func-
tional to the system, allowing politics to continue to exhibit a rhetoric
of closure without having to face inhumane consequences. From this
angle, NGOs can be depicted as co-opted in hegemonic neoliberalism
creating consent for exclusionary policies by preventing highly visible
human rights infringements that might entail “a human rights fiasco”
(Castañeda 2007: 20; cf. also Leerkes 2016).
Scholarly work has also emphasized on the other side that NGOs’
activities have gone beyond the “neoliberal governance” of borders and
that humanitarianism cannot be interpreted as an expression of the
neoliberal project (Sandri 2018; Schweitzer 2017). However, the con-
tested reputation of NGOs has been used to reinforce the broader neo-
nationalist position, which seeks to establish the perverse role of pro-mi-
grant solidarity, while anti-migrant movements themselves have used it
to strengthen restrictive trends across the policy and public spheres. In
other words, an extensive study of the public sphere also makes it pos-
sible to evaluate discursive conflicts by taking into account the pro- or
anti-migrant views expressed by all of the actors taking part. Doing so
allows us to examine how the connections between migration, borders
and citizenship are mediated by discourse, which helps to forge certain
institutional and public orientations.
1 The Politics of Borders and the Borders of Politics …    
9

In fact, the cultural construction of citizenship does not take place


only within the confines of the policy sphere, but it is also shaped by
the continuous re-elaboration of discourse in the public sphere. In other
words, in addition to the constraining and channelling role of laws, pol-
icies and institutions, we need to consider the role of specific “discur-
sive structures” that actors of different kind contribute to shape through
their interventions in the public sphere. These discursive interventions
help us to seize the broader importance of communicative tools of
expressions passing through symbols, narratives, and rhetoric. Hence,
the politics of migration, borders and citizenship is shaped accord-
ing to specific discursive settings that may vary across time and coun-
tries (Chilton and Schäffner 1997; Cinalli and Giugni 2013, 2016;
De Cillia et al. 1999; Wodak 2009).
Accordingly, our study of the public sphere is useful to evaluate
whether restrictive dynamics are hegemonic (Faist 1994; Thränhardt
1995), or rather are subordinate to a liberal type of ‘client politics’
moving from the public into the policy spheres (Freeman 2002). We
also evaluate whether contentious politics over migration, borders and
citizenship in the public sphere can compensate for top-down rep-
resentation and the hegemony of decision-making in the policy sphere,
whatever is the position (for or against migrants, or variations thereof )
that prevail in each sphere. Contributions can thus illustrate potential
mismatches between policy-making on trafficking laws and bottom-up
mobilisation in favour of migrants, against borders, and for a progres-
sive citizenship.
Our focus on the public sphere also shed light on the crucial role
of ‘local battlegrounds’. Take back the example of NGOs: the dispute
over saving lives and carrying people to Europe against the will of gov-
ernments has revealed that ‘humanitarian’ actors can have priorities
and values that are not aligned with those of the political powers and
can act in ways that diverge from governments’ objectives. They have
repeatedly transgressed limitations by prioritizing rescue activities over
the enforcement of state sovereignty. On the same issue, and before the
dispute with Italian and Libyan authorities, Irrera (2016) has shown the
mixing of conflict and cooperation, of political and practical activities,
developed by several NGOs in their relations with EU authorities in
10    
M. Ambrosini et al.

treating the so-called refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. The evolving


international human rights law can also account for the role of urban/
local centres and sanctuary movements. All these elements prepare the
ground for the concluding part of the book, where emphasis is given to
multilevel governance processes.

2.3 Multi-level Governance

Our analysis of the relations between migration, borders and citizenship


also intersects with the growing body of literature on the multilevel gov-
ernance of immigration. This approach looks for a better understanding
of the policy-making process in a scenario in which the traditional role of
the nation state as the pillar of migration policies is challenged by forms
of devolution of responsibilities to supranational authorities, such as the
European Union with Frontex, and to subnational authorities, such as
local governments. It considers not only the management of the entrance
of new immigrants, but also the issue of the integration of the immigrant
population. Multilevel governance has been defined as a structure of rela-
tions between different levels of government, which involves some forms
of coordinated actions and where the frames of migration’s management
are similar or at least congruent between levels (Scholten 2013).
However, although multilevel governance often emphasizes coop-
eration and coordination among actors, this book shows how migra-
tion is also fraught with divergencies and conflicts: between different
levels of government (state vs. local authorities) and between different
actors (public authorities vs. pro-migrant and anti-migrant groups).
Furthermore, the role of non-state actors is often overlooked in studies
of governance, whereas in our analysis it will receive a thorough atten-
tion: social movements, voluntary groups and individual citizens take
part in various activities that influence the management of the bor-
ders and the migration governance. The “criminalization of solidarity”
(Fontanari and Borri 2017) is also a compelling argument that criss-
cross our focus on across the policy and public spheres, since the sup-
port and practical help given to migrants is perceived more often as a
challenge to the policies of border enforcement.
1 The Politics of Borders and the Borders of Politics …    
11

As a consequence of the devolution of responsibilities in migration


policies towards local authorities, mayors and local governments have
achieved a greater power in the decisions concerning the settlement of
migrants in their territories and their access to public services. This is
mainly the case of the more controversial components of the migrant
population, such as asylum seekers and immigrants in dubious or irreg-
ular legal conditions. In some cases, in the United States and in the
European Union, local authorities have joined the movement of sanc-
tuary cities, rejecting the request of national governments to implement
harsher policies towards irregular immigrants: for instance, denying the
access to their local records of immigrant population, or giving access
to local public services also to unauthorized immigrants (Bauder 2017;
Oomen et al. 2016). In other cases, in several EU countries, the recep-
tion of asylum seekers has been contested by local authorities, political
actors and groups of residents. Local authorities have confirmed their
growing salience in the practical governance of migration and asylum
issues, and they are actively involved in the establishment of borders
between the local community and newcomers (Ambrosini 2013; for the
US, Varsanyi 2008).
Even when policies are managed primarily at national level—as is the
case for the reception of asylum seekers—local governments and political
actors play a role: they can cooperate and support the integration of ref-
ugees or actively fight against their settlement. Many local players prefer
to protest the decisions made by national authorities rather than actively
cooperate in the establishment of local projects. Refugees are often
trapped in a scapegoat scenario: They arrive as a group, without invita-
tion or authorization, and are easily visible. They receive public benefits,
which may foster resentment among the local unemployed or poor cit-
izens, for whom welfare provisions are insufficient. Security issues, ter-
rorist attacks and fears of increased criminal activity are other elements
of the campaigns to reject asylum seekers. A particular process of stig-
matisation, as a disjunction between official authorisation to reside and
social opposition (Ambrosini 2016), is enacted here: not only do (native)
citizens reject the settlement of asylum seekers, but local authorities also
espouse the anti-refugee sentiment and actively foment hate speech,
demonstrations and acts of disobedience against their reception.
12    
M. Ambrosini et al.

These visions do not go unchallenged, however. Local policies can be


framed as a battleground upon which different actors engage. This con-
cept highlights how the migration process is managed not only by polit-
ical authorities and legislation, but it is an outcome of power relations
between other actors such as migrants themselves and several actors of
the civil society (Fontanari and Ambrosini 2018). From one side, dem-
ocratic values enshrined in international conventions and national con-
stitutions hamper the implementation of harsh policies. From the other
side, pro-migrant actors actively challenge policies of exclusion, con-
ducting what could be called a debordering campaign. As regards the
multilevel dimensions linking the national to the local (and the inter-
national), this approach proves the most effective for accessing rele-
vant institutions in the policy sphere, as well as civil society groups and
organisations in the public sphere. By focusing on specific city cases,
this book offers a more precise picture of the field of local intervention,
whose dynamics can either serve to reinforce or to weaken main pro-
cesses at the core of politics of citizenship and integration.
Obviously, our choice to include the analysis at the subnational level
also reflects the deeply urban dimension that links the politics of bor-
ders to the history of citizenship in Europe, and its important demo-
graphic implications. Thus, at the urban level, it is interesting to notice
that provision of services for migrants plays a growing role also for some
social movements that are traditionally engaged in the struggle against
borders and in political protests in favour of migrants’ rights. They have
started to organise services for the migrants they politically advocate:
shelters in squatted buildings, as Belloni (2016) has shown in the case
of Rome, but also schools of language, health services, legal advocacy,
bureaucratic assistance. As Montagna (2006), in another case of occupa-
tion of a building that was transformed into a social centre, Belloni talks
of “welfare from below”.
The importance of these actors for migrants’ ventures, and ultimately
their influence in the practical governance of migrations, has pushed
some national and local governments to struggle against the activities
of NGOs, volunteers and other civil society actors in favour of asylum
seekers and unauthorized immigrants. Such behaviour does not occur
only in Hungary, or in the dispute between the Italian government
1 The Politics of Borders and the Borders of Politics …    
13

and NGOs engaged in SAR activities in the Mediterranean. Queirolo


Palmas (2017) has highlighted the prohibition by French authorities
of delivery of food or other necessary goods to asylum seekers settled
in Paris, at Porte de la Chapelle—an ordinance “against solidarity”. In
the same vein, Fontanari and Borri have talked of “criminalization of
solidarity” (2017: 31), citing the cases of activists and private citizens
charged with criminal offences in Italy and France, because of the sup-
port given to migrants in transit.
Putting the point in more theoretical terms, the interplay between
migrants and states, is not a game between two actors, but one in which
at least a third group of actors is involved: various intermediaries, and
in particular (native) supporters. Migration policies have to be seen as a
dynamic battleground where states declare their commitment to fight-
ing against migrants lacking proper documents, but their (declared)
campaigns are challenged not only by migrants’ efforts to enter and
settle, but also by actors who back up migrants’ agency. The agency of
migrants often consists in finding possible supporters and obtaining
their help or protection. The fact that they come into play, and some-
times also incur legal risks, for moral, political or religious reasons, and
not for profit, adds an interesting contribution to a deeper understand-
ing of migration policies and social action.
This subnational focus makes all the more sense when dealing with
real people and groups, since any analysis centred on the national con-
text would make it impossible, in practice, to really identify all the ties
linking actors to all the other actors across the public and the policy
domains. Some scholars have focused on an alternative picture of bor-
ders as complex, stratified, multilayered and multidimensional social
worlds. Accordingly, they are taken as a cluster of nodes in which spe-
cific functions are grouped, rather than the linear strokes that divide
sovereign states. Borders are increasingly studied not as walls, but as
filters, which select people deserving admission and in case free circu-
lation, and people who do not enjoy such rights (see Anderson 2013;
Bonizzoni, this book).
At the same time, systems and actors of reception of asylum seekers
and other migrants are complex and shifting in border zones. As recently
noted in border studies literature, in the analysis of reception systems
14    
M. Ambrosini et al.

and institutions, a relevant aspect is the fluid territories that compose


border zones as complex regions with specific social, economic and
demographic dimensions. Borderlands—as loci in which borders pro-
duce an impact at an economic, social and cultural level—are character-
ised by the emergence and disappearance of formal and informal camps,
settlements and shelters that follow the changes on the mobility poli-
cies at a European level. Analysis of border zones, such as the so-called
“Jungle” of Calais (Sandri 2018), or Ventimiglia-Val Roja (Giliberti
2017) between Italy and France, add many elements to this picture.

3 Plan of the Book


All contributors take into account, adapt from, and engage with each
of three key parts of the volume in their respective chapters. The first
part focuses especially on actors, structures and processes in the policy
sphere. It starts with Catherine Wihtol de Wenden’s chapter in which
she points to a profound contradiction inherent to borders and in the
process of bordering in the world today: on the one hand, she writes,
mobility is celebrated as a symbol of modernity and freedom, even as
a human right. Yet de Wenden notes, citing Michel Foucher, “we never
have had so many borders since the fall of the Iron Curtain.” This is,
perhaps, the supreme irony regarding borders and bordering in our
present moment.
De Wenden’s focus is on the Euro-Mediterranean region. The refu-
gee streams of 2015 generated one of Europe’s most significant crises
since the institutionalisation of the European Union. The borders inside
Europe have, she writes, “disappeared or eroded and lost their emblem-
atic ‘fence’” image with the progressive, free circulation of workers inside
Europe. European citizenship (as defined by the Maastricht Treaty) is
marked by the freedom of movement across internal European borders,
including towards non-Europeans legally in Europe (and de facto for
those even illegally in Europe). This image of free movement suffered, to
an extent, following the refugee crisis of 2015. Borders have been rein-
forced, but distinctions between migrants and refugees have become less
clear—essential for, respectively, the refugee and migration legal regimes
1 The Politics of Borders and the Borders of Politics …    
15

and policies. Distinctions have also blurred between emigration, tran-


sit, and immigration countries at the peripheries of Europe (including
Turkey and North Africa).
De Wenden concludes how the “difficulties of nation-states to con-
trol their borders, and the emergence of political claims from illegal
migrants and their supporters” has given rise to the claim for a right to
mobility at the international level. Border controls have failed to master
world mobility, a failure reinforced by the lack of international govern-
ance on the migration issue. The living conditions of irregular migrants
have shown the limits of policies of closure in the face of the mobil-
ity of populations in the South as well as the need for mobility for the
labour market. “With the growth of populist movements,” de Wenden
observes, “the opportunity for articulating more coherent European pol-
icies on migration and refugees, in the near-future, looks dim.”
In their chapter, Manlio Cinalli and David Jacobson argue that con-
temporary historical forces, notably migration and globalisation, are
leading to an epochal change in the character of borders. The changes
are in large part unarticulated in any holistic legal, political or socio-
logical sense. They note that in the literature on citizenship the issue of
borders is little discussed, even though borders have been at the core of
the emergence of citizenship and, more broadly, are at the centre of pol-
itics itself. The traditional politics of borders has been an essential mech-
anism for determining membership in the civil polity, of who is inside
and a citizen, and who is outside and foreign. But the role of borders
for politics and for citizenship is even more profound than questions of
membership.
Cinalli and Jacobson note the reductionist character of the academic
discussion on citizenship today, often treating the whole discussion as
a function purely of membership, especially in the debate over migra-
tion. But citizenship is a multidimensional concept. Key (but not
exhaustive) to citizenship are the civic and political dimensions. What
one could refer to as, respectively, the horizontal dimension (regarding
membership) and vertical dimension (regarding the governors and the
governed), this distinction between the civic and political aspects of citi-
zenship is so profound that it has informed very different approaches to
citizenship since the earliest day of Western democracy. Most crucially,
16    
M. Ambrosini et al.

the contrast between the civic and the political dimensions of citizen-
ship has informed the approaches to migration. The postnational turn
is an important marker in the scholarly approaches to citizenship from
the 1990s, but it’s overly focused (like other parts of the citizenship dis-
cussion) on the membership dimensions, and considered the expansion
of borders (as in the European Union) but did not the shifts in the very
character of borders.
Here, Cinalli and Jacobson introduce a fundamentally new way of
addressing borders in the concept of Global Seams. They write that the
black-on-white line of sovereign borders are, in Global Seams, replaced
by a more nuanced development. The seams represent in its sartorial
metaphor not only a division but also a stitching together—both factors
are at work. This is not only a process at the literal border (or seam),
but also metaphorically: Courts are undertaking ‘seam’ work when they
weave in international human rights law or norms in their decisions.
Global Seams are spaces where there is, formally as well informally, with
ongoing negotiation and articulation of the transnational forces and
nominally sovereign states. While the greyness of the Global Seam may
first stand out, this is not simply an absence of order, but a necessary
condition for these arrangements to happen—to reconcile or at least
live with the purported contradiction of national states with transna-
tional interests. Furthermore, all of us—citizens and the state alike—
now partake in this fluid environment; even non-citizens are taking
part, through effective state membership, engagement at the seams and
in transnational networks.
Jamie Goodwin-White, focusing on the United States (and demon-
strating a phenomenon cutting across the Atlantic), analyses the geo-
graphic diffusion of bordering practices, especially through increased
subnational immigration enforcement, surveillance, deportation and
detention—all, of course, leading to greater immigrant vulnerability.
However, the continuing evolution of immigration federalism, in the
American case, has also provided openings for equal protection cases
pressed by undocumented residents. Moreover, Goodwin-White notes
in a critical point, the legal battles for belonging have become social
movements far more powerful than a single vote, as widespread accept-
ance of the US Dreamers demonstrates. The Dreamers are the now
1 The Politics of Borders and the Borders of Politics …    
17

grown-up children of the famed Plyler federal court decision in 1982,


which required Texas (and by extension all states) to provide the chil-
dren of undocumented immigrants schooling and other public services.
Goodwin-White’s chapter suggests that US immigration federal-
ism produces “contested denizenships”, both through the geographi-
cally varied terms of immigrants’ daily lives and the related claims that
non-citizen residents can make for membership. It traces immigra-
tion federalism from alienage laws through the landmark University
of California vs. Department of Homeland Security, which challenges
the government’s threatened deportation of California’s ‘critically-­
constitutive’ members. It also examines the evolution of the Dreamers
and discourse around membership, especially in response to government
violence. In so doing, it engages with perspectives on critical bordering,
denizenship, and “sub-national citizenship”. Goodwin-White concludes
by asking: What does it mean when we threaten not to keep strangers
out but to remove members? What happens when potential members
claim not just rights for themselves but responsibilities for the protec-
tion of liberal societies? These events reveal an emergent “fracturing in
the spatiality of citizenship and residence rights,” and how these are
determined at the direction of nation-states only in increasing conver-
sation with judicial, civil rights, and human rights norms articulated
across various scales. It is, in fact, the claims of the most legally vulnera-
ble that have pushed social and legal change.
The second part connects more systematically the policy sphere to
the public sphere. It starts with Olivia Müller’s chapter in which she
points out that public contentiousness over ‘solidarity crime’ in France
has stood out for its complex dynamics bringing together anti-migrant
movements and policy actors across the policy and public spheres on
the one hand, against public interventions by pro-migrants and solidar-
ity movements on the other.
Müller also puts a crucial focus on criminal law so as to systemati-
cally reconnect the policy and public spheres with each other, since the
criminalisation of migration is seen as a progressive invasion of crim-
inal law in various aspects concerning migration, including activities
of solidarity movements. In particular, Müller puts “criminalisation”
tightly in relation with the notion of “securisation”, which is linked to
18    
M. Ambrosini et al.

the fundamental right of being safe, showing that the force of control
(requisitions, investigations, etc.) can complete the process of criminali-
sation by reaching beyond the limits of criminal law itself. For so doing,
Müller divides her contribution into three main parts: first, she analy-
ses the concrete development of a double process of direct and indirect
criminalisation of pro-migrant solidarity; second, she investigates the
effect of criminalisation on the solidarity of pro-beneficiaries; the final
part focuses on the impact of ‘security rights’ on the purposeful polit-
ical confusion between pro-migrant solidarity and anti-humanitarian
smugglers.
In their chapter, Luca Giliberti and Luca Queirolo Palmas deal with
the hardening of French–Italian borders during the ongoing refugee
crisis. Giliberti and Queirolo Palmas argue that, since summer 2015,
the Italian side of this border (in Ventimiglia) has become a crossroad of
migrants’ despair, harsh police control, and growing conflict, while the
French side (in Val Roja) has become the centre of new international
migration routes and mass public debate over supranational politics. In
particular, the authors focus on the bottom-up, informal, non-institu-
tional dimension of solidarity, showing that no deep line of distinction
can be drawn between humanitarian mobilizations on the one hand,
and engagement with politics on the other.
A key point of their argument consists in shedding light on the role
of civil society, which stands out in a broader battlefield that includes
other actors across the public and policy spheres, such as anti-migrant
movements, main political stakeholders and governments.
Simply put, the politics of borders, in its most formal and institu-
tional dimension in the policy sphere, is played at the border of poli-
tics through its interaction with bottom-up mobilization in the public
sphere. Of particular interest for this argument, Giliberti and Queirolo
Palmas refer to forms of direct social action that go beyond traditional
protest action. In this case, humanitarian action can become a place
of political mobilisation and transformation, allowing for bridging of
the distance with direct political engagement. Most crucially, the bor-
der of politics can become a potential place for re-launching a broader
European project, since migrants and their allies in the public sphere are
building up new rails for exploring mobility within the intra-European
1 The Politics of Borders and the Borders of Politics …    
19

space, breaking up the idea of migrants as victims and passive objects of


politics decided in the policy sphere.
The French–Italian borders are also at the centre of the following
chapter, authored by Carlo De Nuzzo. In particular, De Nuzzo focuses
on the complex construction of borders and their continuous adjust-
ments in their double function of the exclusion and inclusion of cit-
izenship. The author shows this oxymoronic characteristic of borders
(meaning borders as a limit vs. borders as sharing) by referring to the
historical construction of bordering in terms of discursive narratives and
rhetoric. Empirically, his extensive study of the public sphere makes it
possible to evaluate the regular swinging of discursive consensus and
conflicts across the French–Italian borders (with some reference to
broader bordering in Europe). This allows De Nuzzo to examine how
the cultural construction of borders and citizenship escapes the limits
of the policy sphere and is mediated by narratives in the public sphere
through discursive interventions of actors of a different kind. Borders
are thus conceived in both their fixed substance of law and more fluctu-
ating content of meanings and discourses across countries and time. In
so doing, De Nuzzo sheds further light on the crucial role that the pol-
itics of borders has in pushing the most fundamental issues for the state
(its sovereignty, its self-defence, etc.) at the borders between the policy
and public spheres.
In the following chapter, Jacopo Anderlini covers elements of the
Italian asylum reception system, particularly the processes of selection
and pre-selection that are enacted at the border, and their implications
in defining trajectories of access or push-backs affecting the mobil-
ity strategies of people on the move. In particular, Anderlini analy-
ses the hotspot approach as a distinct border technology within the
wider context of the European border regime, and examines its role as
an apparatus for the administration of human mobility through dif-
ferential filtering: blocking, pushing back, decelerating, and diverting
migrant trajectories. Based on his fieldwork in Pozzallo on the south-
ern Sicilian coast, the author focuses on the humanitarian dimension
and specifically on the crucial role of medical activity and knowledge
in shaping the functioning of this border apparatus. Anderlini outlines
the relevant aspects that define the humanitarian reason at work at the
20    
M. Ambrosini et al.

border. Following this he gives an overview of the case study before an


exploration of the legal framework underpinning the hotspot approach,
conducting a systematic analysis of practices of medical staff vis-à-vis
migrants and the broader bordering practices. In so doing, he addresses
the crucial relationship between different types of interventions across
the public sphere (such as the activities of volunteer, mainly paediatric,
doctors of the NGO Rafiki—paediatricians for Africa) and the pol-
icy sphere (such as the activities of health professionals of healthcare
institution).
The third and final part of the book completes the systematic connec-
tion across the policy and public spheres by offering an insight into the
local dimension of border drawing. As we highlighted in the previous
pages, borders act at different levels and in different forms. A form of
local border drawing is the local policies of exclusion, as explained in
the respective chapters by Mauricio Ambrosini and Chiara Marchetti.
Both authors talk in particular of Italy and of the heated issue of asy-
lum seekers’ reception by local authorities. In this regard, Marchetti
explains the crucial role of local authorities in implementing the best
structured and monitored solution to the reception of asylum seekers,
i.e. the implementation of SPRAR centres. Their refusal to play the
game has obliged the national authorities to give to private actors the
task of opening extraordinary reception centres (CAS), bypassing local
authorities. Mayors and local governments often at this point protest
against the imposition of the presence of asylum seekers and reception
facilities on their territory: a kind of local border drawing. Marchetti
also provides an interesting list of the arguments used by mayors and
local governments to hamper the settlement of reception centres:
nationalistic (priority to give to Italian citizens in need); securitarian
(preservation of law and order on the territory); bureaucratic (cavils
in formal procedures for the opening of reception centres); assump-
tive (accusation of being “bogus refugees”); utilitarian (negative con-
sequences on local economy and tourism); and paternalistic (lack of
facilities and resources to give asylum seekers the services they need).
Ambrosini, in turn, presents local policies of exclusion as a battle-
ground: a contentious field, in which several actors take part. From one
side, we find groups of residents and political movements who mobilise
1 The Politics of Borders and the Borders of Politics …    
21

against the arrival of asylum seekers. Often local authorities foster and
support these claims. In some way, the opposition against refugees rec-
reates social bonds, giving a new meaning of community to scattered
local societies in front of what is perceived as a threat to the social order.
On the other side, local policies of exclusion foster a mobilisation of
an advocacy coalition in favour of refugees and migrants, ranging from
radical social movements to trade unions, to religious institutions, to
common citizens and spontaneous groups. As a consequence, provid-
ing some help to asylum seekers is more and more imbued of political
meanings, and taking a political position against borders and migration
policies encompasses practical activities in support of people in need.
What happens at an international level with the dispute of NGOs’
search and rescue activities also has a local and plain side. The distinc-
tion between political activism and voluntary work becomes blurry.
Both activities in practice converge into a de-bordering agenda, creat-
ing connections and alliances between different pro-refugee actors, as on
the other side far right movements find legitimisation and expand their
audience mobilising together with local residents and authorities against
asylum seekers.
Paola Bonizzoni delves into the micro-social dimension of border
drawing, going beyond asylum seekers and local policies. She analy-
ses borders as filters and shows how the selectivity of migration poli-
cies and social practices work in different fields, challenging a clear-cut
division between insiders and outsiders, but distinguishing in various
ways the desirable from the undesirable, the genuine from the bogus,
the deserving from the undeserving. Membership can be granted in
formal and informal ways. For instance, migrants can be legally irreg-
ular, but socially accepted as deserving workers—mainly in the case of
women working for native households. As a consequence, membership
and borders can be negotiated through several resources and strategies,
which vary according to gender, age and ethnicity. Some events, such
as marriage, divorce, childbirth, reaching the age of majority, finding
or losing a job, can have crucial implications on the legal status and
social acceptance of migrants. Several intermediaries and supporters in
turn come into play, working at the intersection between migrants and
local societies: ethnic networks and brokers, employers, civil society’s
22    
M. Ambrosini et al.

organizations and street-level bureaucracies can exert an influence on


the position of migrants through the borders of receiving societies.
Finally, Barbara Oomen and Emma Leenders introduce another
dimension of local borders: the role of local authorities and actors in the
Participation Declaration workshops that municipalities are required
to organize by the Dutch government. These workshops are part of the
civic integration policies spreading in the European Union from the
1990s, as a strategy to check the political loyalty of new migrants and
to foster a cultural alignment with a set of Western or national values
of receiving societies. What is particularly interesting is the apparent
devolution of responsibility to local authorities in defining the actual
rights and responsibilities of new migrants. In this way their place in
border policies is widened, encompassing also symbolic and cultural
dimensions.
Furthermore, Oomen and Leenders highlight three aspects of their
study on the implementation of such policies. First, the workshops
involve several (diverging) actors, unpacking the concept of local gov-
ernments, and describing a much more complex picture, in which
public and private actors, state and non-state, across the policy and
public spheres, play a role in carving out the everyday understanding
of migrants’ citizenship. Second, the authors emphasise the importance
of the street level, involving not only civil servants, but also volunteers,
private employees and others, with their backgrounds and beliefs. The
everyday activities and negotiations between people who manage the
workshops define in practice the framework of rights and responsibili-
ties, the balance between inclusion and exclusion, welcoming and oth-
ering, that migrants have to learn. Third, Oomen and Leenders show
that these street-level actors tend to bend the contents of the workshops
towards pragmatic aims, in spite of normative teachings on citizenship.
In this local borderwork, conclude the authors, “The local workshops
might well serve as places for the politics of bordering, but they also
serve as borders in which the symbolic and the political makes places for
street-level interpretations that are primarily pragmatic”.
This volume brings together a set of scholars from different countries,
different specialities and different methodologies. Their chapters can be
read singularly and stand on their own. But read together, they provide
1 The Politics of Borders and the Borders of Politics …    
23

a map to navigate the intersections of migration, borders and citizen-


ship, and how those intersections are arrived at through the multilevel
engagements of the policy sphere and the public sphere—and how both
spheres act in the larger context of international human rights—and
global constraints and demands. Or, to use a different metaphor, the
chapters are puzzle pieces which, brought together, give one of the most
comprehensive pictures on policy-making and public interventions
regarding migration, borders and citizenship available today.

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2
From Borders to Seams: The Role
of Citizenship
Manlio Cinalli and David Jacobson

1 Introduction
In the literature on citizenship the issue of borders is little discussed,
even though borders have been at the core of the emergence of citizen-
ship and, more broadly, are at the center of politics itself. The traditional
politics of borders has been an essential mechanism for determining
membership in the civil polity, of who is inside and who is alien or
foreign. But the role of borders for politics and for citizenship is even
more profound than questions of membership. With the emergence of
civil polities, humans progressively shifted away from social organization
based on kinship, where the boundaries of community (feudal, tribal,
patrimonial and the like) and status therein were determined by birth.
Instead, in principle in civil society blood descent lessened as the basis of

M. Cinalli (*)
Sciences Po, University of Milan, Milan, Italy
e-mail: manlio.cinalli@sciencespo.fr
D. Jacobson
Department of Sociology, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA
© The Author(s) 2020 27
M. Ambrosini et al. (eds.), Migration, Borders and Citizenship, Migration, Diasporas
and Citizenship, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22157-7_2
28    
M. Cinalli and D. Jacobson

determining one’s status. In lieu of the role of kinship, sharply bounded


territoriality became the basis for defining community.
The modern nation-state aggregated community, polity and territory,
dimensions of association which have historically been disaggregated. In
feudal Europe, for example, community was mostly local, the fractured
and hierarchical polity extended across the Holy Roman Empire, and
territories were a quilt of authorities, sometimes overlapping. In this
chapter, we argue that a number of contemporary historical forces such
as migration and globalisation are leading to an epochal change in the
character of borders. The changes are in large part unarticulated in any
holistic legal, political or sociological sense.
In this chapter we go beyond analysing these changes, which are
evolving in the context of globalising economic, migratory, cultural and
technological developments in an ad hoc way. Building on these devel-
opments, we suggest an holistic articulation of these changes—indeed,
we begin outlining a blueprint for the future. Any set of sociological,
economic, technological and political changes can generate positive or
negative outcomes for humanity. How do we seek to shape such devel-
opments with the welfare and human rights of people at the center
of concern? It is within this context that we suggest the emergence of
seams, in lieu of borders per se.
So, in sum, we briefly outline here, first, an analysis of the changing
dynamics of borders and bordering, and the associated politics. Second,
we note the lineaments of an articulation of these developments, or a
blueprint that at once builds on and seeks to positively direct underly-
ing social and political changes. Global changes do not happen only in
terms of broad, abstract structural forces. Human agency, for better and
for worse, has a role.
How do we understand borders and their implications for citizenship
in our present, globalising moment? We turn to, first, citizenship and
the dimensions that implicated bordering (usually implicitly). Second,
we will explicate the implications of these concepts for citizenship and
for borders and bordering—with particular interest in our present,
globalising time.
2 From Borders to Seams: The Role of Citizenship    
29

2 The Study of Citizenship


as a Multidimensional Notion
Citizenship is an extraordinary concept and practice that evolved over
thousands of years and, for our contemporary experience, in particular
over the recent 300 years. In the most classic approach, citizenship has
been approached as an ontological question, or otherwise as a question
about the substantive content of being a citizen. In this sense, citizen-
ship has drawn the border of politics itself. Suffice it to say, for now,
that the most accepted answer to the question about the substantive
content has been determined to be that of Marshall’s formulation.
In this formulation, we have an expansive idea of citizenship, and its
associated rights, evolving over the course of history, and in particular,
acquiring recognisable civic and political dimensions, before ending in
the last stage of social rights (Marshall 1950). This account owes its suc-
cess to a vision that aligns with an ambitious project of stretching the
border of politics through a continuous extension of rights, based on a
core belief in the virtues of post-World War II Western democracy (the
period in which Marshall himself writes). Marshall’s evolution of rights
has been viewed as an efficient way to secure a tolerable level of class
inequality through economic redistribution.
The Marshallian account has effectively brought together different
types of rights in a cohesive narrative; yet it blurs distinct dimensions
of citizenship that are independent from each other. In particular,
this is evident in Marshall’s juxtaposing ‘civic citizenship’ (as mutual
engagement and acknowledgement among equal citizens, in a shared
“membership” of the civic community) on the one hand, and ‘political
citizenship’ (regarding the agreed relationship between the governed
citizens and their governors), on the other. We can refer to these
dimensions as, respectively, the horizontal and vertical dimensions of
citizenship. In fact, civic rights do not necessarily lead to political rights,
whose content can mainly refer to the access of citizens to institutions
and policy actors with a view to engage with their decision-making.
If the continuum between civic and political rights is not necessary
in theory, it is not necessary in historical, empirical practice either.
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Title: The coat without a seam, and other poems

Author: Helen Gray Cone

Release date: August 28, 2023 [eBook #71508]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1919

Credits: The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at


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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COAT


WITHOUT A SEAM, AND OTHER POEMS ***
THE
COAT WITHOUT A SEAM And
Other Poems
BY THE
SAME
AUTHOR

A CHANT OF LOVE FOR


ENGLAND AND OTHER POEMS

A volume of miscellaneous
poems containing as its title poem
a reply to the German “Hymn of
Hate.”
“Firmly and finely fashioned,
and unaffectedly sincere.”—The
New York Times.
“Miss Cone’s verse shows a
delicacy of imagination which is
deserving of high praise.”—The
Outlook.
$1.50 net

NEW YORK
E. P.
DUTTON &
COMPANY
681 Fifth
Avenue
THE
COAT WITHOUT A SEAM
And Other Poems

BY
HELEN GRAY CONE
Author of “A Chant of Love for England,
and Other Poems”

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 Fifth Avenue
Copyright 1919, by
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Grateful acknowledgment is made, for permission to reprint some


of the poems in this book, to Scribner’s Magazine, The Outlook, The
Sonnet, The New York Evening Post, The New York Times, The
Boston Evening Transcript, and The Association Monthly.
CONTENTS
PAGE
The Coat Without a Seam 1
Sonnets of the Great Peace 9
Moods of War:
The Sword 21
Aligned 23
Earth-brown Armies 26
The Imperative 27
War-Sacrifice 29
The Youth and War 31
Mothers of Soldiers 33
A Reprisal 35
On the Death of an Untried Soldier 39
The Airman 41
To Francis Ledwidge 42
The Way of the White Souls 44
Respite 47
Happy Country 49
To France 51
To Belgium 53
The Creed of an American 55
The Ultimate Victory 58
Roosevelt, 1919 60
The Quiet Days:
Old Burying Hill 65
Heartbreak Road 66
Romance 67
Faith 69
Intimations 70
On the Singing of “Gaudeamus Igitur” 72
The Countersign 74
Failure Triumphant 75
The Spark 77
Foxgloves 79
The Christmas Bagpipes 80
When Roses Go Down to the Sea 82
Ritual for Summer Dead 85
Red October 87
The Singer Chooses the Songs of the 89
Wind
The Gleam Travels 91
The Gray Victory 93
Flags and the Sky 96
THE COAT WITHOUT A
SEAM

THE COAT WITHOUT A SEAM

There was a web, ere Time began,


Woven on the loom of God,
Woven for the need of Man.
Through the web two colors ran,
Blue that is the sky of God,
Red that is the blood of Man.
The web was woven, the web was one:
The stars sang when the work was done.

God had willed it to be worn—


Fit garment for the heavenly feast—
By Man, that was to be His son.
Only God could dream that dream!
When Time began, and Man was born,
He clothed himself in the skin of the beast,
And under it beat the heart of the beast.
Not till Man be born God’s son
Shall he wear the Coat without a Seam!

(Ah, the dream, the wondrous dream


Of a World without a Seam,
Man being one, as God is one,
Brother’s brother and Father’s son,
All earth, all Heaven, without a seam!)
The Roman strode through field and flood,
Blind as Fate with battle-blood;
Victory glittered in his hand;
And when he laid him down at night
Under the stars of some strange land,
Weary of the march or fight,
He wrapped his heart in the vast dream
Of a World without a Seam;
Yet the dream was not divine;
The fierce heart beat like marching feet:
“The World is one—the World is mine!”
That was the dream of states foregone,
Of Babylon, of Macedon;
Sleeked by whatsoever art,
It is the dream of the beast’s heart.
Massive-treading Rome paced on
(As Macedon, as Babylon,)
Into the dusk of states foregone:
She left her mantle still astream
Along the wind, her purple dream—
Not the Coat without a Seam!
The eyes of emperors see it float,
They hail it for the sacred Coat:
Men follow on through field and flood,
Blind as Fate with battle-blood.
See the sworded sceptred train,
Out of the dusk they all advance:
Iron-crownéd Charlemagne,
Barbarossa flaming past,
Sombre majesties of Spain,
Pomps of old monarchic France—
Supreme Napoleon last,
Sweeping his ermine-bordered robe
And gripping fast the globe.
(Nay, who is this that follows him,
A vision helmeted and grim,
A countenance pallid and aghast?)
—Into the dusk they all are gone,
As Babylon, as Macedon.
Not till Man shall dream God’s dream
Shall he wear the Coat without a Seam!

(Ah, the dream, the wondrous dream


Of a World without a Seam!
Man being one, as God is one,
Brother’s brother and Father’s son,
All earth, all Heaven without a seam!)

“What shall we do, we simple folk


Who walk as cattle in the yoke?
Surely the vision of this Coat—
Fit garment for the heavenly feast—
Is for prophet and for priest,
Not for men of little note!
Surely the quest to find this Coat—
Woven of empyrean thread
Heaven-blue and heart-red—
This is for Kings and Chancellors,
Parliaments and Emperors,
Not for men of little note!”
—Nay, this do ye every one:
All your days to dream God’s dream,
That Man, who is to be His son,
Shall wear the Coat without a Seam!
SONNETS OF THE GREAT PEACE

“Incertainties now crown themselves assured


And peace proclaims olives of endless age.”

—Shakespeare’s Sonnet CVII.

What boon is this, this fresh and crystal thing,


Perfect as snow, dropped from the deep of the sky—
This healing, shed as from the soft swift wing
Of some great mystical bird low-sweeping by?
This music suddenly thrilling through the mind
Angelic unimagined ecstasy,
As when warm fingers of the Spring unbind
Young brooks that laugh and leap, at last being free?
By what white magic, what unfathomed art,
Was this best gift secretly perfected,
This amulet, that laid against the heart
Melts all the icy weight that held it dead?
This is that Peace we had and did not know;
This is that Peace we lost—how long ago!

II

Shall we not now work wonders with this charm,


To the vext heart of the world benignly laid,
Fending all future golden lads from harm,
And all gray mothers, and every starry maid?
Yea, all kind beasts that ask with patient eyes
Our wisdom to forestall bewildering pain:
Yea, all kind fields, trees rippling to the skies,
Brown earth sweet-breathing under natural rain.
Shall we not now, being freed, being healed of Peace,
Retrieve all days to be from blot and blight,
Give to the chained goodwill of Man release,
And a new deed of manumission write
On a new page, made by this marvellous boon
Pure as unfooted snow under the moon?

III

How did we cast away our careless days


In that old time before we knew their worth,
Wandering with chance, even as a child that strays,
Spilling their unprized splendors on the earth!
But now we have eaten War as daily bread,
Borne it upon our souls a weary weight,
Made it the pillow to a restless head,
Breathed it as air, sick with the reek of hate:
And Peace is come a stranger, and grave-eyed,
Like a young maid turned woman; on our knees
We do her reverence as a spirit enskyed;
How should we spend such shining days as these?
They have cost great pain: needs must we hold them dear,
Counting our jewels with a heavenly fear.

IV

Ghosts of great flags that billowed in the sun


With glorious colors above the crowded street,
Lifting our hearts to know the rent world one,
Teaching the march of Man to hurrying feet,
Shall ye not haunt those skyward spaces still
With memory of your sun-illumined streaming,
Bright brother-angels heralding goodwill,
Beckoners of sordid spirits to noble dreaming?
Or shall your many beauteous blazonries
Fade out from the dulled sense and be forgot,
And intimations so august as these
Lapse into silence even as they were not,
Comrades turn rivals, and heart-fast allies
Weavers of schemes, peering with insect eyes?

What shame were this to those who lie asleep


Under the scarlet poppies, having bought
A clean new world with blood! Shall we not keep
Faith with our dead, and give them what they sought?
Is not a world the measure of our debt
To those whose young lives sadly we inherit,
Living them out, making them fruitful yet?
What lesser meed fits their transcendent merit?
The future was their sacrificial gift,
And joy unborn, and beauty uncreate,
And little children that should racing lift
Their torch of life, laughing at death and fate:
Shall we not make, mindful of all they gave,
A star of this old earth which is their grave?
MOODS OF WAR
THE SWORD

One of the seventy had a sword


The day that Christ was crucified:
He followed where they led his Lord,
The man that could not stand aside.

When that first hammer-stroke rang loud,


And left and right the rabble swayed,
He flashed from out the staring crowd,
He died upon the Roman blade.

His fruitless deed, his noteless name,


By careless Rome were never told.
Now shall we give him praise or blame?
Account him base, acclaim him bold?

Was he the traitor to his Lord,


Deeper than Peter that denied,
The loving soul that took the sword,
The man that would not stand aside?

Or did the glorious company


Of Michael’s sworded seraphim
With chivalrous high courtesy
Rise up to make a place for him?
ALIGNED

Why do you leap in the wind so wild,


O Star-Flag, O Sky-Flag?
And why do you ripple as if you smiled,
Flag of my heart’s delight?
“I laugh because I am loosed at last,
Free of the cords that bound me fast
Mute as a mummy, furled on the mast,
Far from the beckoning fight!

“I joy because I am aligned—


The Star-Flag, the Sky-Flag—
With these the noblest of my kind,
Flags of the soul’s desire!
And where the blended Crosses blaze,
And where the Tricolor lifts and sways
To the marching pulse of the Marseillaise,
I may be tried in the fire!”

Yea, not for gold and not for ease,


My Star-Flag, my Sky-Flag,
The Fathers launched you on the breeze,
Flag of man’s best emprise!
Yea, not for power and not for greed,
But to fly forever, follow or lead,
For the world’s hope and the world’s need,
Flower of all seas and all skies!
And better you were a riddled rag,
My Star-Flag, my Sky-Flag,
The faded ghost of a fighting-flag,
Shredded, and scorched with flame,
Than that you should now be satisfied
Over splendid cities and waters wide
To flutter and float in an idle pride,
To flaunt in a silken shame!

Then well may you leap in the wind so wild,


O Star-Flag, O Sky-Flag!
And well may you ripple as if you smiled,
Flag of our hearts’ delight!
We joy because you are aligned
With these the noblest of your kind:
We are yours and theirs with a single mind—
Let us on to the beckoning fight!

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