Rules, Paper, Status by Anna Tuckett

Author:Anna Tuckett [Tuckett, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781503606494
Google: 5ixWswEACAAJ
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2018-01-15T04:26:54+00:00

4

Becoming an Immigration Adviser

Self-Fashioning through Bureaucratic Practice

Extract from fieldnotes, January 2011

Chiara and I are on one of our usual Saturday afternoon walks around the city. We stop at John’s internet café so that she can make a long-distance call to her parents in Eritrea. The café is alive with activity. Several customers are using the phone booths, while others are at desktop PCs checking their e-mail. As we enter, Chiara warmly greets John, a middle-aged Nigerian man, and they briefly exchange niceties, asking after each other’s families. John is sitting in a large swivel office chair behind the counter. He is dressed smart casual in a shirt, sweater, and chino-style trousers with a hands-free earpiece attached to the side of his head. On the desk in front of him is a permit renewal application form that he is in the middle of completing for a man standing next to the counter clutching a plastic bag filled with paperwork.

I stand outside the booth as Chiara uses the phone, observing the comings and goings. It is a couple of weeks before “click day,” when decreto flussi applications must be submitted online. Applications can be completed independently, but most applicants seek out help, such as at the advice center. John’s internet café is clearly also offering a similar service. As I wait, two people come in to ask him for information about the application process. Chiara finishes her phone call, and as we leave we overhear John arranging an appointment to complete the online decreto flussi application for a client the following week. “Ha,” Chiara snorts. “He is doing decreto flussi applications here as well. I wonder how much he is charging. Immigration, Anna, is big business,” she tells me knowingly.

Ethnographic studies of law and bureaucracy have long highlighted the unintended consequences, what might be called “side effects” (Ferguson 1990) or “spillovers” (Cabot 2014: 2), produced by legal and bureaucratic processes. This chapter focuses on one such spillover: the emergence of immigration advisers, or community brokers, who assist migrants in their navigation of the documentation regime. When dealing with the Italian immigration bureaucracy, the assistance of some kind of adviser is essential for even long-term migrants. Here I examine the manner in which becoming an immigration adviser is a means through which individuals with migrant backgrounds are able to escape the low-status occupations to which migrants are usually restricted in Italy.

Anthropological work on law and bureaucracy has highlighted the affective potential of legal and bureaucratic processes to produce uncertainty, indeterminacy, anxiety, and hope for those involved within them (Kelly 2006; Navaro-Yashin 2007; Nuijten 2003). In relation to immigration law, scholars have shown how legal processes discipline subjects as “deportable” (De Genova 2002), create deep uncertainty in people’s lives (Gonzales and Chavez 2012), or, paradoxically, produce cultural insiders (Tuckett 2015).

In this chapter I show how engagements with immigration law produce possibilities for self-fashioning and social mobility. By focusing on the role of community brokers, I show how styling oneself as an immigration adviser and expert enables these brokers to develop new subjectivities.

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