States of Discipline by Cemal Burak Tansel

Author:Cemal Burak Tansel [Tansel, Cemal Burak]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
Published: 2017-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

Figure 7.3. Choucha Refugee Camp

Luca Manunza, 2011

The list of unjustified purchases and fraudulent uses of public money for reception is much longer than the one that was made public by the prosecutor.5 Furthermore, as revealed in an interview with the representative of an important union in Campania, this money was often used to support mafia-run businesses:

The Hobbit hotel in Scampia, where many migrants were housed, belonged to the mafia family of Marano, just like the Tifata resort in Salerno, where migrants were often given food once a day, like dogs. Or the Millennium hotel in Eboli, where migrants lived in a building without windows and doors, which was only later renovated.6

In addition, an interview conducted with a social worker revealed that migrants rarely received their €2.50 daily allowance for pocket money to which they were entitled. The money was instead stolen by the managers of the hosting facilities and used to run illegal activities like the one described below:

Some managers did not give migrants pocket money for four to six months. On top of that, they came up with illegal ways to take advantage of that situation. The €2.5 bonus could be spent exclusively in a pre-established list of shops, which were quite far from the hotels and the city centre. For example, migrants had to make a real journey to buy phone cards to contact their families in their countries and they didn’t even have money to buy bus tickets. The managers would offer to take the pocket money and buy the things migrants needed. Of course, this ‘service’ came with a high price, which sometimes amounted to 50 per cent of the pocket money that the managers would keep for themselves.7

Another interesting aspect about these actors is their racially biased and selective management of migrants. For example, a manager of one such hospitality association showed up at the landing of migrants but selected some specific nationalities of asylum seekers. This person discarded the Eritreans, Somalis and the Syrians based on the assumption that they would not want to stay in Italy and attempt to leave, thus they would not guarantee the monthly income for the association.

The business of migration has also produced mechanisms of urbanization and repopulation of urban and rural areas. This sector has played an important role in the transformation of existing social patterns. In the case of Italy, the population of national origin is declining (–0.1 per cent), while the population of international immigrants is increasing with an average rate of 7.8 per cent (Caritas 2015). The presence of migrants has a substantial impact on the urban space, as well as on the broader economic and social systems of the host countries or regions. Migrants play a significant role in the labour force of the hospitality industry—a staffing mechanism mostly implemented in large urban areas. In Italy, the hospitality industry acts as a nexus between different state and non-state actors, as it increases the profits of hotel companies in the absence of formal clients.

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