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What is offensive is these governments’ housing arrangements for asylum seekers

In the aftermath of the fire at the Napier barracks in Kent, asylum seekers’ unsanitary and unsafe appalling living conditions were revealed once again. The overcrowding and poor hygiene made it impossible for people to remain safe during the Covid-19 pandemic. Similar conditions were earlier found by Red Cross at Penally barracks, Wales, where 200 asylum seekers were housed. Medical care was also lacking in both places. Asylum seekers have protested repeatedly and some went on hunger strike, to no avail.

The housing of asylum seekers in overcrowded and poorly-facilitated barracks and hostels by profit-making contractors is the trademark of anti-asylum, anti-migrant policies seen across Britain and Europe. Brexit or not, Britain has a lot in common with the continent in terms of hostility to “outsiders”.

Europe’s colonial legacy ensures the lasting racial arrangement of space: people from former colonies are being allocated living space segregated from society in postcolonial Europe.

Italy’s allocation of space

In Italy where I researched working and living conditions of migrant workers for my book Ciao Ousmane, what always stood out was the extent to which segregation exists and is still practised. The Italian state and society has not broken away from its colonial past, the legacy of which carries on in the form of anti-migrant racism in public life as well as institutionally. White Italians and “outsiders” (asylum seekers and migrant workers) occupy two parallel worlds. The former are active citizens, while the latter are the passive object of political discourse and are forced to be indebted to their “host society”.

The racial categorisation and allocation of space is the norm, evident across regions. Cities and provincial towns are inhabited by white Italians while African workers (most of whom were/are asylum seekers) are kept out, living in subhuman conditions in rural ghettoes. There are the rural encampments in Campobello di Mazara, a west Sicilian town that has always been one of the most important stops in the cycle of seasonal labour in Italy, producing its world-famous Nocellara del Belice olives. Also the tent city of San Ferdinando, Calabria, which was demolished in 2019, and the various encampments in rural Foggia, of Puglia, the largest ones being Borgo Mezzanone and Gran Ghetto.

Tent city, San Ferdinando, Calabria, Italy. | Author’s image.

The majority of the residents of these rural ghettos are sub-Saharan African workers. They have been through the asylum reception system and are nicknamed the ‘CAS people,’ after the Centro di Accoglienza Straordinaria (Extraordinary Reception Centre). Many workers are also former asylum seekers from the secondary-level shelters and the under-aged from the minor centres. They left the asylum reception system for a variety of reasons: some because their shelters closed down, others were asked to leave when reaching eighteen or failing to receive humanitarian protection. Sub-Saharan African workers are at the bottom of the hierarchy: they are usually paid between €15 and €20 on average (off-season rate) in agriculture.

They become agrarianised: their employment options are limited to agriculture; they are heavily exploited, entrapped in poverty and destitution and denied of any prospect of social mobility.

2.JPGOlive harvest, Campobello, west Sicily. | Author’s image.

The ghettoes, designed to be away from society, indicate to the general populace that the “outsiders” are out of sight and no longer an immediate “problem”. Their invisibility placates racist minds. To maintain that invisibility, abandonment by the state is always accompanied by state intervention, in the form of demolition, eviction and constant police raids and harassment. According to sociologist Loïc Wacquant, University of California, the political nature of a “ghetto” is a racialised space produced by a combined absence and presence of the state. Oscillating from total abandonment to criminalisation, this is how Italy forms and maintains ghettoes for its asylum seekers and migrant workers.

In Campobello, “the housing situation of migrant workers has evolved from the total absence of institutional interventions, up to the institutional management of the only spaces made acceptable,” and the illegalisation of informal settlements, all of which ignores workers’ voices, according to sociologists Martina Lo Cascio of University of Bergamo and Valeria Piro, of University of Padova.

Mohammad, a Gambian worker and former asylum seeker in Campobello who I knew, tried to break through this racial arrangement of space but couldn’t. He asked why African workers cannot live amidst the townsfolk and why they are prevented from renting in town. “If local farmers see me as a ‘good worker,’ what is stopping local society from seeing me as a fellow resident?” He did not want to feel like a commodity to be used when needed and discarded when not. He felt in need of some recognition that he was just like them: human.

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