The limits of local citizenship: administrative borders within the Italian municipalities

Citizenship Studies ISSN: 1362-1025 (Print) 1469-3593 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccst20 The limits of local citizenship: administrative borders within the Italian municipalities Enrico Gargiulo To cite this article: Enrico Gargiulo (2017): The limits of local citizenship: administrative borders within the Italian municipalities, Citizenship Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13621025.2016.1277982 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2016.1277982 Published online: 08 Jan 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 79 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ccst20 Download by: [Universita degli Studi di Torino] Date: 20 January 2017, At: 05:50 Citizenship studies, 2017 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2016.1277982 The limits of local citizenship: administrative borders within the Italian municipalities Enrico Gargiulo department of Law and political, social and economic sciences, university of eastern piedmont, Alessandria, italy ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY This article explores residency, a form of municipal membership that plays a strategic role in Italy. Residency is a formal status and a means to have access to rights. Therefore, it is a sort of local citizenship that, at least in part, equalises citizens and non-citizens. Due to its strategic role, many local authorities have paid serious attention to it recently. Municipalities have illegally tightened the requirements provided for by national laws for obtaining the status of resident or introduced new requirements. Stressing the different mechanisms of exclusion from residency, this article explains that they often work as administrative borders. These are bureaucratic barriers that, by denying residency, aspire to regulate, symbolically and sometimes materially, the composition of the people living within municipal territories and to redistribute rights between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ individuals. As such, administrative borders fragment individual statuses and provoke an increase in civic stratification. Received 17 March 2016 Accepted 13 december 2016 KEYWORDS Residency; local citizenship; administrative borders; mechanisms of migrant selection; ‘municipalityless’ people; legal yet locally unrecognised migrants Introduction Residency is an important legal status1 in Italy. This is a sort of local membership, regulated by central authorities, granted by each municipality to the people who legally (if non-citizens) and habitually live within its territory. More specifically, according to national laws,2 all Italian citizens, EU citizens who satisfy some requirements,3 and non-EU citizens who have a permit to stay must be enrolled at the registry offices of the municipalities in which they live (Dinelli 2011; Morozzo della Rocca 2003; Vrenna 2003). In other words, these people must obtain municipal registration, thus becoming formal members of the local communities where they have settled. Within the Italian legal system, residency gives access to many rights. As a consequence, without it, these rights only exist on paper. Therefore, municipal registration occupies a strategic position in Italy. Besides being a means for obtaining services and benefits, residency is also a status that, at least in part, levels the differences between citizens and (‘legal’) non-citizens. At the local level, the former and the latter are put on the same plane inasmuch as both of them have the right to municipal registration and find in residency the same kind CONTACT enrico Gargiulo enrico.gargiulo@uniupo.it © 2017 informa uK Limited, trading as taylor & Francis Group 2 E. GARGIULO of recognition. For this reason, the status of local resident, though not defined by closed borders, is a sort of local citizenship, which unites both Italian and non-Italian citizens. Due to its strategic role, in recent years, residency has often been used by local authorities as a selective tool. Many municipalities, most of the time citing security reasons, have illegally tightened the requirements provided for by national laws for obtaining the status of resident or have introduced new requirements. In so doing, they have triggered mechanisms of exclusion which aspired to regulate, symbolically and materially, the composition of local communities and to redistribute rights between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ individuals. As a consequence, an exclusionary and narrow model of local citizenship has emerged in contemporary Italy. By trying to grasp the role of residency as a contested and potentially not inclusionary form of local membership, this article aims to contribute to the debate on urban citizenship (Bauböck 2003; De Graauw 2014; Ford 2001; Holston 1999; Isin 2000; Purcell 2003; Varsanyi 2007). To this end, it draws upon the findings of a research project focused on Italy and, more specifically, on two Italian regions, Lombardy and Veneto, which present a higher concentration of exclusion mechanisms than in other parts of Italy. By resorting to these findings, the article shows in depth the ways with which a local status of membership is shaped by different national and municipal actors and, above all, unveils the exclusionary side of urban citizenship. Thus, while most of the literature on this topic stresses the role of pro-migrant activists and/or the inclusionary actions by some municipal governments, the work proposed here provides a detailed empirical account of the local dynamics of exclusion and a theory about the ambiguities of local citizenship. Moreover, the article concerns the literature on borders and bordering processes (Bigo 2014; Paasi 1998; Van Houtum and Van Naerssen 2001; Walters 2002). The analysis conducted here shows how the denial of residency produces internal and invisible borders that aim to select the worthy part of local populations. Even though they do not create spatial separation, these borders increase the degree of social stratification by including people in a differential manner. The article resorts to a varied set of strategies and data. First, a critical analysis was carried out on the discourses contained within the administrative acts and provisions (mostly mayors’ orders and circulars) of 100 municipalities as well as public declarations by many mayors, printed in newspapers and periodicals. Second, ten qualitative interviews with key informants (lawyers, trade unionists, and members of pro bono organisations), and twenty qualitative telephone conversations with municipal employees in charge of enrolment procedures were conducted. Third, quantitative data from fifty municipalities were collected. The article is structured as follows. The first section puts the issue of the exclusion from residency within the debate on urban citizenship and the literature on borders. In this section, a theory of exclusionary local citizenship is proposed. The second and third sections illustrate the status of residency and describe the actors that are in charge of it, also stressing the ambiguities of control on this status. The fourth section deals with the mechanisms of exclusion, proposing a typology of them. The fifth and sixth sections show the purposes of exclusion and its effects, deepening the theory of administrative borders depicted in the first section. The seventh section focuses on the fragmentation of statuses caused by these borders. Finally, the conclusion stresses the empirical and analytical contribution of the article to the debates on urban citizenship and borders by highlighting the most relevant theoretical issues at stake. CITIZENSHIP STUDIES 3 The exclusion from residency within the urban citizenship debate and border studies Over the last twenty years, urban (or local) citizenship has become an important topic in the social sciences and, especially, within the field of citizenship studies as well as geography and urban studies. The literature on urban citizenship provides a different perspective of cities and inclusive rights, exploring how, in the current age of globalisation, cities are an alternative locus for the sociocultural, economic, and political membership for international migrants as well as marginalised populations (De Graauw 2014). Within the studies on urban citizenship, local residency is considered the basis for social membership and a position that legitimates participation in decision-making (Bauböck 2003; Ford 2001; Holston 1999; Isin 2000; Purcell 2003; Varsanyi 2006, 2007). According to many scholars, those who are de facto members of local community – because they live and work within the boundaries of a given municipality or send their children to local schools – should be recognised de jure, regardless of their nationality and their legal status. Within scholarship, urban citizenship is mainly approached as a bottom-up process led by grassroots activists and aimed at expanding immigrants’ rights (Coll 2011; Ehrkamp and Leitner 2003; Pincet 1994; Rocco 1999; Siemiatycki and Isin 1997), without specific attention paid to the agency of city officials and the role of local governments. Nevertheless, some studies focus exactly on this issue, showing how local authorities, in some cases, recognise undocumented foreigners and expand their rights by developing a local membership policy (Briffault 1993; De Graauw 2014; Marrows 2012; Varsanyi 2006, 2007, 2010). This article aims to contribute to the urban citizenship debate by stressing some issues generally not covered by this kind of scholarship. Instead of approaching local citizenship as a bottom-up process, the paper meticulously focuses on the agency of municipal authorities. But, differently from the studies that analyse the role of local governments, it provides empirically grounded accounts of the ways Italian municipalities deny immigrants and marginalised groups a form of local recognition dictated under national laws, thereby upsetting the national monopoly on the registration of people legally present within their territories. More in detail, the municipalities studied here, unlike the local authorities on whom other research has focused, use their discretionary powers not to improve the rights and services granted to irregular immigrants but to restrict (illegally) the status and rights of ‘legal’ immigrants (in addition to those of marginalised Italians). This article shows that, in Italy, a formal status through which people de facto present at municipal level are recognised de jure – a sort of urban citizenship – already exists, albeit limited to ‘legal’ immigrants. Using the words of Sassen (2006), this is an assemblage of citizenship at the subnational level. In fact, through the formal status of municipal resident, the three components of territory, authority and rights are asserted. At the level of municipal territories, individual rights are actually enjoyed and statuses of membership are formally recognised as an effect of the authority that local governments exercise on behalf of the state. As a result of this assemblage, the legal and social subject of local citizen emerges, and it includes both national and non-national citizens. But the article also shows that, though residency is a condition of formal membership among people of different nationalities, it often becomes a tool of exclusion towards some groups. This happens when local authorities overstep their role by violating national regulations in order to restrict the requirements for enrolment. In this case, municipalities illegally try to impose their authority by setting their own local regulations on residency. 4 E. GARGIULO Thus, they build up a different assemblage of citizenship at the subnational level, and affirm a narrow and exclusionary idea of local membership. This article aims to make a fruitful contribution to the literature on urban citizenship because it also lays the foundations for a comparison between Italy and other countries where legal and administrative tools similar to residency exist. For instance, in Spain (Arango and Jachimowicz 2005), Finland (Alastalo and Kynsilehto 2015) and the United States (Rodríguez, Chishti, and Nortman 2010), interesting interactions (and sometimes conflicts) between local and central levels of government regarding municipal registration or regulation of immigration exist, while in China (Cheng and Selden 1994; Wang 2004), a sort of residency – called hukou system – is still used as a tool of polity-building and control of people’s mobility. Moreover, the article aims to contribute to the borders debate. The mechanisms of exclusion analysed here can be considered as bordering devices, even though they do not directly and automatically produce a physical exclusion. In fact, a border does not necessarily separate spatially but, above all, causes social segmentation and stratification (Bigo 2014; Paasi 1998; Rumford 2006; Salter 2008; Van Houtum and Van Naerssen 2001; Walters 2002). The line that divides formal residents and people who are materially present but not registered is actually a sort of ‘invisible’ internal border that does not directly cause spatial segregation but clearly produces effects in terms of social differentiation. Those who are denied registration live together with those who are registered, even though they occupy lower positions within the local community. In other words, mechanisms of exclusion from residency strengthen the system of civic stratification (Lockwood 1996; Morris 2003a, 2003b), namely ‘a system of inequality based on the relationship between different categories of individuals and the state, and the rights thereby granted or denied’ (Morris 2003a, 79). For this reason, it will be argued that these mechanisms are administrative borders that, though being different from the ‘new’ walls analysed by Brown (2010), resemble them for several reasons. According to this scholar, these walls, as distinct from the old kinds of barriers, ‘produce a spatially demarcated “us”, national identity, and national political scale when these can no longer be fashioned from concepts of national or political autonomy, demographic homogeneity, or shared history, culture, and values’ (Brown 2010, 119). More specifically, these tools of division ‘split’ a territory, separating people more than segregating them (De Leonardis 2013). Besides, the new walls, inasmuch as they act on territories and not on individuals, substantially tend to neglect those who are outside of them. As a result of their action, differences turn into distances (De Leonardis 2013). Unlike Brown’s walls, the strategies aimed at preventing registration do not act on space and separate spatially. But, similarly to these barriers, they neglect some individuals and groups, in this case by denying them formal recognition and rights instead of the possibility of living in a certain area of a town. Moreover, like Brown’s walls, these mechanisms of exclusion from residency have to do with sovereignty: even though local authorities are not sovereign regarding the composition of local polities, nevertheless, they act as if they had powers on shaping local citizenry. In this way, municipalities lay claim to a full control on registration. As the article will show, administrative borders can have different purposes and produce diverse effects. They can be used as mere rhetorical tools or employed as devices of actual population design. In the first case, mayors want to reassure the local community by pledging to their electors to protect their safety from the ‘threats’ of immigrants and lowlife CITIZENSHIP STUDIES 5 people. In this way, these mayors pretend to have, and publicly exhibit, a sovereignty that de jure they do not own. Here, mayors act visibly, and send a simple and explicit message to both the municipality’s people and the central authorities: ‘we are masters at our home’. In the second case, local authorities want to decide who deserves to be a formal member of municipal polity and actually enjoy rights. In this way, mayors and municipal officers de facto exercise a sort of municipal sovereignty which goes beyond the limits of national laws. By behaving in such a way, they aim to obtain material, and not just symbolic, effects, namely to select the ‘legitimate’ population and reserve their right to grant rights to ‘legitimate’ local citizens. To this end, they act less visibly and more informally than they do when aiming to reassure the community. Thus, a theory of local administrative borders must involve different purposes and effects as well as diverse tools and devices – formal and informal, visible and invisible. Such a theory deals with security issues, given that migrants’ movements towards municipalities are framed as an emergency and threat, and, above all, with the topic of population design. For these reasons, the theory proposed here can also contribute to the studies on the multiplication of borders (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013) by stressing how contemporary capitalism is not only made of physical and legal barriers between the states, but also of municipal rhetorical and administrative borders within the states, that provide a selection of suitable people and produce social distinctions which can be economically useful. A kind of local citizenship: residency as a legal status of municipal membership Residency is a status through which the presence of individuals is formally recognised at the municipal level. This status is made of both a subjective element – the choice of using a given place as one’s dwelling – and an objective one – the habitual presence in a certain place. The existence of the first element is automatically proven when a person asks municipal offices to be enrolled. However, the fact that a person habitually lives within the boundaries of a municipality is in itself a proof of residency, even if that person does not want to be registered and, consequently, does not declare their presence. Thus, the legal status of resident is above all a res facti, namely a de facto condition largely independent from individual intentions (Dinelli 2011). Within the Italian legal system, residency is a duty.4 Every person who lives in a legal (if non-citizen) and stable way within the territory of a municipality is obliged to declare their presence and apply to be registered. At the same time, each local authority is expected to exhort people who live stably within the municipal boundaries to declare their presence. Residency is a duty because enrolment at the registry office strives to have the de jure population correspond exactly to the de facto population. In other words, if individuals declare their presence and local authorities enrol those who are present within their territories, the municipal register provides an accurate picture of the local community. This way, registration is a strategic tool for controlling the local population by acquiring information about its composition, its characteristics, and its movements. From this perspective, residency is a form of social control that is part of the broader need of knowledge and surveillance characterising modern states and their security apparatus (Heilmann 2007). It is a form of social control targeting not only the individuals but also the space in which they live. The implementation regulations for registration contain a 6 E. GARGIULO detailed set of requirements for local governments concerning the necessity of partitioning and mapping their territory and denominating its parts. But, according to Italian law, residency is also a right. Italian citizens and legally present foreigners who are settled in a given municipality5 and declare their presence must be registered, and the local government cannot refuse to do this. Indeed, residency is mostly based on the habitual presence in a specific place, and, therefore, is a de facto condition expressing the link between a person and a territory. Consequently, when this condition takes place, de jure recognition must follow. Besides being a right in itself, residency is also a means to actually exercise rights. According to Italian law, enrolment at the registry office is the precondition for accessing social assistance and public housing, enrolment in the National Health Service,6 acquiring citizenship, voting in local elections for EU citizens, etc. It follows that, without residency, an individual who is a holder of a specific right according to national or regional laws, cannot actually enjoy it. For these reasons, in Italy residency is a sort of local or urban citizenship. Yet, the use of the term ‘citizenship’ to qualify a local status of membership is quite controversial and, therefore, needs some clarification. Municipalities are indeed different from states because they do not have closed borders. As stressed by Bauböck (2003), local borders, as distinct from national borders, are open to everybody: ‘The right of free movement within the national territory is not a privilege of citizens but a human right’7 (Bauböck 2003, 149). However, residency is a sort of citizenship for two main reasons. First, it is a formal status that, just like national citizenship, flattens the differences among groups. More specifically, residency equalises, at least in part, citizens and non-citizens. The former and the latter maintain their diverse statuses of national belonging but receive the same legal recognition at the local level. Second, it constitutes a right to which many other rights are tied. Therefore, as with citizenship, residency – rephrasing Arendt (1951) – is an ‘equaliser’ status and it is a right to have (or better, to exercise) other rights. Consequently, those to whom it is denied are ‘municipalityless’ persons. Since they are not recognised by a lower level of government, the rights they are entitled to at higher levels – Italian national laws, those of the European Union and international law – are not actually exercisable. A contested status: the control of residency and its actors Within the Italian legal system, residency is regulated by the state. Nevertheless, in order to be managed more easily, the powers and competencies on the procedures of registration are delegated to municipalities. Formally, local authorities are simply appointed to apply the national rules. Regarding residency, mayors act as government officers – i.e. bureaucrats – and not as politicians. Even though they play a political role, being directly elected by the local citizenry and legitimated to act as autonomous decision-makers, their role concerning registration is that of civil servants. Consequently, they only have to comply with national regulations. More in general, Italian mayors are not sovereign regarding the composition of local polities. Specifically, they cannot prevent Italians and non-Italians legally present in Italy from crossing municipal territories or even from living within them, nor can they decide not to register people de facto present and holding the right to registration. CITIZENSHIP STUDIES 7 According to national laws, municipalities, first of all, are charged to check that all the people who live in a legal and stable way within their territories are actually enrolled within their registry offices. Secondly, they have to verify that those who declare to be settled within municipal boundaries truly reside where they claim to dwell.8 To this end, local authorities have to check the existence of the requirement called ‘habitual dwelling’ and have to register people if the outcome of this control is positive. Thirdly, with regard to non-citizens, they must verify that those who apply for residency are in a condition of legality. Apart from these tasks, local governments do not have any other power and, hence, are not allowed to add additional legal requirements for enrolment or to tighten the existing requirements. For instance, a municipality is not permitted to request an apartment in keeping with a specific standard, the ownership of a job contract, the absence of criminal records, etc. Yet, in recent years municipalities have frequently gone against or bypassed state powers and national laws, thereby exercising an illegal, but nonetheless actual, sovereignty regarding registration. A large number of local authorities, claiming to protect their citizens’ security and public decorum from dangerous and undesirable people, have tried to restrict the right to residency, mainly through mayors’ orders and circulars that modified national requirements in an exclusionary way (Fondazione Cittalia 2009; Guariso 2012; Lorenzetti 2009). As the analysis of the discourses contained within municipal acts and provisions revealed, these documents often resorted to emphatic and alarming language. For example, the order 258 issued in November 2007 by the mayor of Cittadella9 – a little town located in Veneto – depicted the movement of migrants towards municipal territory as ‘huge migration flows’ which threaten ‘public hygiene and health’ as well as ‘public order’, and represent a ‘real’ emergency which must be faced by diminishing the number of formal local residents. Many municipalities started acting this way in 2007 when Romania and Bulgaria joined the European Union, and, since then, Romanian and Bulgarian citizens have no longer needed a permit to stay in order to legally reside in Italy, being subjected to a special regime of enrolment at the registry office.10 These municipalities added requirements expressly addressed to EU citizens and even, in some cases, reserved for Romanians and Bulgarians. For instance, the order of Cittadella asked citizens of European states to prove that the source of their income was licit. More generally, local authorities have targeted migrants and lowlifes, considering them to be a threat to the local community and, consequently, non-(local)citizens (Ambrosini 2013; Cammarata and Monteleone 2014; Naletto 2009). Shortly thereafter, the exclusionary actions of municipalities were facilitated by the central government’s issue of decree 92 of 2008,11 the first part of the so-called ‘Security Package’. This rule12 allowed mayors to also use administrative orders beyond emergency situations and introduced the legal notion of ‘urban security’ (Stradella 2010; Vandelli 2009). Although it did not expand mayoral power in terms of regulating residency, many local authorities used it as a pretext to issue orders which restrict the right to enrolment. But the recourse to strategies of exclusion from residency has also been encouraged by other state legislative interventions. Law 125 of 2009, the second part of the so-called ‘Security Package’, allowed local authorities to verify the condition of the dwelling place any time a person applies to be registered. This law does not oblige municipalities to do this control and, above all, does not establish that its outcome may be an impediment to enrolment (Mariani 2010). However, many municipalities have used the state of apartments and accommodations as an illegal, but often effective, justification to deny individuals residency. 8 E. GARGIULO Later, decree 80 of 2014,13 the so-called ‘Home Plan’, declared granting residency to people living in a home or a property that is illegally occupied to be illegal. For the first time in Italy, a link between the legality of the occupation of a dwelling place and the possibility of obtaining enrolment was established. Hence, this law has constituted a great chance for mayors. Many of them, citing the Home Plan as a justification, have demanded requirements even exceeding its requests, such as the consent of people who are already registered as residents in the same apartment. Therefore, local authorities have definitely gone beyond national laws, restricting the right to residency even more than the central authorities did with the recent legislative changes. This way, municipalities have visibly claimed and materially exercised a sovereignty they do not formally possess, showing the desire to manage local citizenship with their own rules. At the same time, prefectures – the territorial government offices of the Ministry of the Interior which are required to monitor the correct application of regulations regarding municipal registration – have sanctioned those municipalities that have illegally denied people residency in only a few cases. Mechanisms of exclusion from residency Restrictions on the access to residency act as mechanisms of exclusion, which work in different ways. Synthetically, they can be explicit, acting through formal acts or provisions, or implicit, working by means of the practices of the officers. Moreover, these mechanisms can be direct, altering the legal requirements regarding enrolment, or indirect, prescribing controls or documents (not provided for by laws) concerning issues that, apparently, do not affect enrolment. In the first case, a local administrative act or provision explicitly introduces new requirements for enrolment or tightens the existing ones. Data collected from municipalities shows that this explicit and direct type of mechanism can lead to a formal and written denial of residency, illegally accounted for with the lack of the requirements expressly provided for by a mayoral order or circular. In the second case, new requirements are verbally introduced or existing requirements are toughened by street level bureaucrats during the interactions with the people who apply for residency. Qualitative telephone conversations with municipal employees and interviews with key informants revealed that this implicit and direct type of mechanism can be due to conscious exclusionary strategies of municipal officers, maybe inspired or suggested by mayors,14 as well as to the way their professional knowledge is structured. Sometimes, this entails an unwittingly restrictive vision of the rules on registration. As declared by a municipal officer, ‘when someone comes to us asking for residency, we give them the “third-degree”, because, according to the law, in order to be enrolled you must have all the documents and meet all the requirements, having a job contract and proving that your apartment is in good condition’. In the third case, formal provisions and measures introduce controls or documents which do not directly affect registration but de facto are used as a pretext for denying residency. For instance, orders or circulars, especially after law 94 of 2009, often prescribe verifying the condition of the dwelling place during the controls concerning registration. Even though, according to the law, these checks should not compromise the right to obtain residency, their negative output is used to assert that the ‘habitual dwelling’ requirement is not met. CITIZENSHIP STUDIES 9 To this end, local authorities, as emerged from interviews with key informants, trigger an indirect and explicit type of mechanism by basically resorting to the following spurious logical argument: an unsuitable apartment is uninhabitable and consequently, cannot be used as a habitual dwelling. In the fourth case, controls that are not directly requested to obtain registration are used for speciously demonstrating that the ‘habitual dwelling’ requirement is not actually fulfilled. Again, checks on the condition of the dwelling place play a major role. However, here we have an indirect and implicit (instead of explicit) mechanism because there is no written document that prescribes such a kind of check. Hence, clarified by telephone conversations and interviews, informal practices of street level bureaucrats – municipal officers and local police officers who materially do the controls – are decisive. For instance, a municipal officer declared that ‘we ask local police if there is furniture in the apartment; if there isn’t, we don’t grant residency because that person does not actually live there’. The purposes of mechanisms Mechanisms of exclusion from residency have different purposes. First, they can be mere tools of propaganda, being widely publicised but not actually applied. For instance, mayoral orders are often employed by mayors to gain visibility and reassure citizens, telling them that local authorities protect their safety and public decorum from ‘dangerous’ and ‘undesired’ people. Though not implemented, these exclusionary strategies can provoke actual effects. They spread negative descriptions and representations of certain individuals and groups, fostering discriminatory categorisations and establishing distinctions. This happens, for instance, when within the texts of the orders the condition of a non-citizen is more or less explicitly associated with that of a dangerous person, or when mayors publicly declare that immigrants are denied residency because they use to live in dirty and unseemly houses and are involved in illegal activities. The categorisations and distinctions contained within institutional discourse can prevent people who have the right to enrolment from declaring their presence to municipal offices and, consequently, can push them to renounce residency. In other words, in order to avoid stigmatisation, people who feel they belong to the groups described within the texts of orders or circulars may prefer to remain in the condition of administrative ‘ghosts’, present yet bureaucratically invisible, at least for municipal offices.15 Second, mechanisms of exclusion from residency can be actual tools of polity-building, aimed at reshaping the boundaries of local communities so as to make the actual population conform to the municipal people ‘imagined’ by local authorities. In this case, these tools sometimes are less visible and publicised and more opaque and indirect since they do not aspire to publicly blame some groups but to exclude people who belong to them. So, at least in part, mechanisms may be hidden. As a consequence, those who are denied residency are not completely aware of the reasons for the denial, and access to information is quite difficult. When the redefinition of community boundaries is at stake, symbolic exclusion turns into material exclusion. The distinction between good and bad and legitimised and illegitimated local citizens aims at selecting local community members. This selection can have two main goals: pushing away undesired people and allocating rights in an asymmetric way. In the first case, mechanisms of exclusion from residency try to establish internal borders. Such frontiers were effective in the past when controls were carried out by the central 10 E. GARGIULO government through national laws that prohibited registration to whoever was not able to demonstrate having a job contract in a given municipality. This prohibition – introduced by a law issued in 1939 called ‘against urbanism’ and abrogated in 1961 – was the precondition for the expulsion from a municipal territory, given that the denied registration was usually followed by a local order of deportation (Gallo 2011). Nowadays, the expulsion from a municipal territory can no longer be carried out directly. Mayors do not have the authority to deport people if they are denied residency. Only the territorial offices – Prefetto and Questore – of the Ministry of the Interior have this power. So at most, municipalities can advise central authorities about the presence of ‘dangerous’ or ‘suspect’ people who were previously refused enrolment, exhorting security forces to remove them from their territories. In the second case, mechanisms of exclusion from residency aim at drawing a line between those who actually deserve to exercise their rights in a given municipality and those who do not. Such a kind of boundary provokes an asymmetrical allocation of rights, setting aside benefits and provisions exclusively for ‘good’ and ‘desired’ local citizens. By triggering these mechanisms, local authorities want to contain social expenditures, strengthen the relations with the electoral constituency, and put those who are refused enrolment in a state of legal and material disadvantage. Administrative borders and their effects Mechanisms of exclusion from residency are administrative borders since they work as non-physical but yet bureaucratic barriers that, by denying residency, aspire to ‘protect’ some spheres of local community life from undesired people. More specifically, these barriers affect the political sphere, making the right to vote ineffective with regard to Italian citizens and EU citizens.16 This way, people who are de facto members of a local community but are not formally registered as municipal residents are kept out of the local electoral constituency. Moreover, the barriers analysed here influence the social sphere, impeding access to many welfare benefits and services as well as to public social housing and limiting the full enjoyment of the National Health Service. Finally, the administrative borders condition the economic sphere, producing workers without rights in local labour markets. Therefore, mechanisms of exclusion from residency, though not as effective as direct tools of expulsion, are indirect means of removal from municipal territories. People who are denied enrolment are not explicitly forced to move away from a municipality that does not recognise them. Nevertheless, they can feel discouraged from living in a place where they are not formally recognised and their rights are not protected. So, they are somehow pushed to leave that territory. Otherwise, these administrative borders do not work as tools of spatial exclusion, but as means of differential and dependent inclusion. Keeping people, who are denied residency, in a condition of legal and material subordination means making them more docile and vulnerable workers for local labour markets. From an economic perspective, having people without rights within municipal territories can be an advantageous outcome for local authorities and economic actors. Administrative borders, in spite of some huge differences, resemble the ‘new walls’ described by Brown (2010). Even though these borders do not separate spatially, they draw invisible lines that internally divide the local population into ‘first class’ and ‘second class’ CITIZENSHIP STUDIES 11 local citizens. Thus, administrative borders do not hide differences under spatial distances. Rather, they produce social distances by establishing symbolic, formal, and substantial inequalities. However, like the walls depicted by Brown and De Leonardis, mechanisms of exclusion from residency ‘neglect’ the people that they exclude. Those who are denied enrolment are deprived of an administrative identity and are thereby reduced to the status of ‘administrative ghosts’, present yet invisible. This invisibility is not neutral. The lack of registration produces relevant effects by stigmatising individuals, preventing them from actually enjoying rights and, in some cases, pushing those who are refused enrolment to move away. Invisible walls: civic stratification and fragmentation of statuses Effective but illegal mechanisms of exclusion from residency act as administrative borders that fragment the statuses with which individuals are linked to the Italian state. Basically, each status is doubled by effect of the denial of registration. Two individuals who have the same legal status are formally equal, but they become different when one of them is enrolled while the other is illegally denied enrolment. For instance, the status of those foreigners who have a work permit is divided into two diverse positions: the foreign workers ‘legal’ and recognised on the one hand, and the foreign workers ‘legal’ but not recognised on the other. Hence, mechanisms of exclusion from residency strengthen the system of civic stratification. By effect of these mechanisms, Italian citizens are detached as ‘first class’ and ‘second class’ citizens. Simultaneously, the gap between Italians and non-Italians becomes wider. Moreover, the statuses of non-citizens tend to increase. Synthetically, due to the exclusion from residency, the local (and ‘legal’) municipal population – that is the set of the people who legally and habitually live within the boundaries of a given municipality – is basically made up of four different types. The first status is that of ‘good’ citizens, namely those Italians who are considered socially acceptable, being neither perceived as nor are legally labelled as ‘socially dangerous’ and, preferably, having a decorous and appropriate dwelling. The second status is made up of ‘acceptable’ non-citizens, that is, EU citizens and third country citizens legally present in Italy and showing ‘suitable’ cultural traits as well as a good socioeconomic condition. The third status is composed of ‘undesired’ citizens’, Italians excluded from residency because they exhibit unpleasant and unwanted features. They often belong to Roma populations, are homeless, or have criminal records. The fourth and last status is that of ‘legal’ yet illegitimated non-citizens, i.e. individuals authorised by national laws to stay in Italy but not recognised by municipalities because they lack behavioural and socioeconomic requirements that local authorities consider necessary: for instance, the absence of criminal records, the ownership of a job contract, the availability of a decent dwelling, etc. The right column of Table 1 shows the stratifying effects that the mechanisms of exclusion from residency cause on non-citizens. As a result of these mechanisms, those who are recognised as municipal residents (positioned in the second cell) occupy a higher place in the system of stratification while those who are denied recognition (positioned in the fourth cell) occupy a lower position of the same system, even though the former and the latter are equal as regards their legal status. But other important effects on the system of stratification can be observed by focusing on those who are not locally recognised as residents, namely people who occupy the two 12 E. GARGIULO Table 1. the local (and legal) municipal population. Recognised as municipal residents not recognised as municipal residents Citizens ‘good’ citizens ‘undesired’ citizens Non-citizens ‘acceptable’ non-citizens ‘legal’ yet illegitimated non-citizens Table 2. differences among people excluded from residency. illegally excluded from residency enrolled elsewhere Local non-citizens (but residents elsewhere) not enrolled at all ‘Municipalityless’ people cells of the lower row of Table 1. These people resemble the ‘authorised yet unrecognised’ described by Sassen (2006, 296, 297), a person who is full member of a community ‘yet non fully recognised as such’, being discriminated and excluded from many domains of social life.17 Unlike this social figure, nevertheless, the legal yet illegitimate person lacks a (municipal) legal recognition even before a social recognition, and because of that, they are prevented from actually exercising many rights. Within the people illegally not recognised as residents, the distinction between citizens and non-citizens is quite important, since the latter occupy a lower position in the stratification system. However, another essential distinction has to be drawn between those who are enrolled at the registry office of another municipality and those who are not, and therefore without any registration. Within Table 2, the cell of local non-citizens (but residents elsewhere) is occupied by those Italian citizens who remain enrolled in the municipality where they were born or where they lived previously as well as by those non-Italian citizens who had entered Italy and obtained registration in another municipality before moving to the one that does not recognise them. Instead, the cell of ‘municipalityless’ people is seldom occupied by Italians – only if they are born outside of Italy or have formerly moved abroad – and is composed mostly of those non-Italians who arrived in the Italian territory for the first time. Evidently, ‘local non-citizens (but residents elsewhere)’ are less vulnerable than the ‘municipalityless’. While the former can at least exercise their rights in a municipality different from that in which they live, the latter cannot. Thus, ‘municipalityless’ lack any kind of local recognition, thereby resembling stateless persons. Conclusion Many Italian municipalities use the formal status of residency to ‘design’ the local population in a desired manner. The community ‘imagined’ by local authorities is mainly made up of Italian citizens and ‘legal’ immigrants who do not show any of these cultural, behavioural, and socioeconomic traits: being homeless, belonging to Roma people, having a bad dwelling, a low income or criminal records, etc. Therefore, residency is used to delegitimise the presence of undesired categories of individuals within given parts of Italy and to reduce their rights. More specifically, the denial of the local status of a resident works as an administrative border that symbolically and materially excludes with the purpose of selecting ‘deserving’ local citizens. This article contributes to the study of urban citizenship by providing analysis and original empirical data on the administrative borders drawn by Italian local authorities. CITIZENSHIP STUDIES 13 Table 3. Mechanisms of exclusion from residency. direct indirect Explicit Adding or tightening requirements through formal acts and provisions introducing additional controls or documents through formal acts and provisions Implicit Adding or tightening requirements through informal actions hinging speciously on the output of controls Specifically, it adds novel conclusions about the exclusionary forms that local citizenship can take and unveils the material limits of this status. Furthermore, the article contributes to the theoretical debate on urban citizenship by framing residency as a new local assemblage of citizenship, and showing that such a status can be more or less inclusionary depending on: (a) the type of actors involved and the roles they play; (b) the legal tools that shape local membership. Thereupon, the Italian case reveals that when mayors and municipal officers exercise an illegal authority violating national regulations and territorial offices of government do not intervene, local citizenship becomes a ‘reserved’ status. Likewise, the case presented here explains that the construction of such a non-inclusionary status is highly facilitated by the use of flexible and opaque administrative means and bureaucratic practices, which act as invisible borders separating desired and undesired local residents. For instance, as illustrated in the cells 2, 3, and 4 of Table 3, the exclusion from residency can be fulfilled through the formal introduction of requirements apparently not affecting enrolment – thereby not alarming people potentially affected by them or pro-migrant activists – as well as the informal and specious use of the controls on the habitual-dwelling requirement. This article also adds novel elements to border studies, as it shows how these invisible boundaries work and what role they play in regulating the composition of local polities. In this way, the article underlines that the fragmentation of statuses provoked by the exclusionary behaviour of local authorities can be better captured by resorting to the concept of ‘civic stratification’ and applying it to the specific dynamics of local levels. Moreover, it states that the ideas of ‘differential’ and ‘dependant inclusion’ are useful for grasping the stratification effects of the exclusion from residency. In conclusion, the article stresses some risks associated with the idea that broadening the powers of municipalities would help them to develop a formal urban citizenship (Bauböck 2003). In fact, the Italian case shows that local governments often use local forms of recognition in a more exclusionary than inclusionary way, frequently pursuing their purposes through discretionary authority and almost secret mechanisms. Notes 1. 2. 3. A legal definition of residency (residenza) is provided for by article 43 of the Italian civil code, which says that ‘residency is where a person has she or her habitual dwelling’. The enrolment at the registry office (iscrizione anagrafica) is regulated by law 1228 of 1954, modified by decree 5 of 2012 (becoming law 35 in 2012), and the decree of the President of the Republic 223 of 1989, containing the implementation regulations. These requirements, modified over time by some ministerial decrees and circulars, are provided for by legislative decree 30 of 2007, which implements EU directive 38 of 2004, concerning the regulation of European citizens’ movement within the EU space. This legislative decree establishes that those EU citizens who want to stay in Italy for more than three months are supposed to declare their presence and apply for enrolment at the registry 14 E. GARGIULO 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. office of the municipality they live in. In order to be enrolled, differently from Italian citizens and non-EU citizens, they have to satisfy some requirements concerning their economic and working conditions as well as health insurance ownership. As explicitly stated by article 2 of law 1228 of 1954. Being settled in a municipality does not necessarily mean living in a home or apartment. According to national regulations, residency must be awarded even to people who live in caravans or slums as well as to homeless people. Indeed, the recognition of this status is completely unconnected with the material conditions of where one lives, as also clarified over the years by some ministerial circulars (8 of 1995 and 2 of 1997). Actually, some categories of non-EU citizens can enrol for the first time in the National Health Service (NHS) without having residency by simply declaring the place where they live de facto. However, in order to renew the enrolment, they need a residency. With regard to EU citizens, the requirements they must meet to be enrolled in NHS are more or less equal to those needed for municipal registration. Thus, people lacking the latter likewise do not meet the former. With respect to Italian citizens, the link between residency and enrolment in NHS is quite tight: basically, people are enrolled in the same municipal district in which they reside. Provisional exceptions are made for people who temporarily live in a municipality different from that in which they are registered. Moreover, the Italians who live in other countries must enrol in a specific register for citizens living abroad (called AIRE), having been withdrawn from both Italian municipal registers and NHS. However, within the Italian legal system, all those who do not have the right to enrolment in NHS have the right to basic and emergency assistance, regardless of their legal status. For Italian citizens, the right of free movement is sanctioned by article 16 of the Italian Constitution. For EU citizens, this right is protected by article 18 of the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community. Regarding third country citizens, the right to free circulation within state boundaries is guaranteed by some international treatises: article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and article 2 of protocol 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Generally, the local police are entrusted with this kind of check. This order was the most famous and reproduced one. In fact, since its issuing, many other municipalities have used it as a model. This regime of enrolment was previously illustrated in note 3. Later turned into law 125 of 2008. In 2011, the Italian Constitutional Court, with the sentence 115, declared to be unconstitutional the part of law 125 of 2008 that had extended mayors’ powers. Turned into law 80 in May 2014. In some cases, mayors give officers a sort of ‘decalogue’ of rules, namely a list of illegal requirements to ask people who want to register. Clearly, they can be more visible for other authorities, for instance police forces. Obviously, only with regard to local and European elections, given that EU citizens do not have the right to vote in national elections. Regarding this, Sassen talks about the Japanese housewife, ‘a person whose very identity is customarily that of a particularistic, non-political actor’ (2006, 296). Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. ORCID Enrico Gargiulo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0459-3128 CITIZENSHIP STUDIES 15 References Alastalo, Marja, and Anitta Kynsilehto. 2015. “Border Multiple, Multiple Borders: Registering Foreignborn Persons in Finland.” Paper presented at the ESA Conference 2015. http://esa12thconference. eu/programme. Ambrosini, Maurizio. 2013. “We are Against a Multi-ethnic Society: Policies of Exclusion at the Urban Level in Italy.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36: 136–155. Arango, Joaquín, and Maia Jachimowicz. 2005. “Regularizing Immigrants in Spain: A New Approach.” The online journal of the Migration Policy Institute. http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/ regularizing-immigrants-spain-new-approach. Arendt, Hannah. 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Berlin: Schocken Books. Bauböck, Rainer. 2003. “Reinventing Urban Citizenship.” Citizenship Studies 7 (2): 139–160. Bigo, Didier. 2014. “The (In)securitization Practices of the Three Universes of EU Border Control: Military/Navy – Border Guards/Police – Database Analysts.” Security Dialogue 45 (3): 209–225. Briffault, Richard. 1993. “Who Rules at Home? One Person/one Vote and Local Governments.” The University of Chicago Law Review 60: 339–424. Brown, Wendy. 2010. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cammarata, Roberto, and Raffaele Monteleone. 2014. “La sicurezza al tempo delle ordinanze. Potere locale e discorso pubblico. [Security at the Time of Orders. Local Power and Public Discourse]” In La ragione politica. 2. I discorsi delle politiche [The Political Reason. 2 The Discourse of Policies], edited by Vando Borghi, Ota De Leonardis and Giovanna Procacci, 83–120. Naples: Liguori. Cheng, Tiejun, and Mark Selden. 1994. “The Origins and Social Consequences of China’s Hukou System.” The China Quarterly 139: 644–668. Coll, Kathleen. 2011. “Citizenship Acts and Immigrant Voting Rights Movements in the US.” Citizenship Studies 15 (8): 993–1009. De Graauw, Els. 2014. “Municipal ID Cards for Undocumented Immigrants: Local Bureaucratic Membership in a Federal System.” Politics and Society 42 (3): 309–330. De Leonardis, Ota. 2013. “Altrove. Sulla configurazione spaziale dell’alterità e della resistenza [Elsewhere. On the Spatial Configuration of Otherness and Resistance].” Rassegna italiana di sociologia 54 (3): 351–378. Dinelli, Federico. 2011. Le appartenenze territoriali. Contributo allo studio della cittadinanza, della residenza e della cittadinanza europea [Territorial Belongings. A Contribution to the Study of Citizenship, Residency, and European Citizenship]. Naples: Jovene. Ehrkamp, Patricia, and Helga Leitner. 2003. “Beyond National Citizenship: Turkish Immigrants and the (Re)construction of Citizenship in Germany.” Urban Geography 24 (2): 127–146. Fondazione Cittalia. 2009. Oltre le ordinanze: I sindaci e la sicurezza urbana [Beyond Orders. Mayors and Urban Security]. Rome: ANCI, National Association of Italian Municipalities. Ford, Richard. 2001. “City-states and Citizenship.” In Citizenship Today: Global Perspectives and Practices, edited by Alexander T. Aleinikoff and Douglas Klusmeyer, 209–233. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Gallo, Stefano. 2011. Senza attraversare le frontiere. Le migrazioni interne dall’Unità a oggi [Without Crossing Borders. Internal Migrations from Italian Unification to Nowadays]. Rome-Bari: Laterza. Guariso, Alberto. 2012. Senza distinzioni. Quattro anni di contrasto alle discriminazioni nel Nord Italia [Without Distinctions. Four Years of Opposition against Discriminations in the Northern Italy]. Milan: Associazione Avvocati per Niente Onlus. Heilmann, Eric. 2007. “Comment surveiller la population à distance? La machine de Guillauté et la naissance de la police moderne.” Archive Ouverte en Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication. http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00125574. Holston, James, ed. 1999. Cities and Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Isin, Engin F., ed. 2000. Democracy, Citizenship, and the Global City. New York: Routledge. Lockwood, David. 1996. “Civic Integration and Class Formation.” British Journal of Sociology 47 (3): 531–550. Lorenzetti, Anna. 2009. “Il difficile equilibrio fra diritti di libertà e diritto alla sicurezza [The Difficult Balance between Freedom Rights and the Right to Security].” In Le ordinanze sindacali in materia di 16 E. GARGIULO sicurezza pubblica e sicurezza urbana. Origini, contenuti, limiti [Mayors' Orders on Public Security and Urban Security. Origins, Contents, and Limits], edited by Anna Lorenzetti and Stefano Rossi, 191–205. Naples: Jovene. Mariani, Francesca. 2010. “Iscrizione anagrafica e domiciliation: un breve confronto tra le istanze di sicurezza italiane e le esigenze di coesione sociale francesi [Municipal Registration and Domiciliation: a Brief Comparison between the Italian Requests of Security and the French Needs of Cohesion].” Diritto, Immigrazione e Cittadinanza 1 2 (1): 78–97. Marrows, Helen B. 2012. “The Power of Local Autonomy: Expanding Health Care to Unauthorized Immigrants in San Francisco.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 35 (1): 72–87. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2013. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Morozzo della Rocca, Paolo. 2003. “Il diritto alla residenza: un confronto tra principi generali, categorie civilistiche e procedure anagrafiche [The Right to Residency: a Comparison between General Principles, Civilistic Categories, and Municipal Registration Procedures].” Il Diritto di Famiglia e delle Persone 4: 1013–1042. Morris, Lydia. 2003a. “Managing Contradiction: Civic Stratification and Migrants’ Rights.” International Migration Review 37 (1): 74–100. Morris, Lydia. 2003b. Managing Migration: Civic Stratification and Migrants’ Rights. London: Routledge. Naletto, Grazia. 2009. Rapporto sul razzismo in Italia [A Report on Racism in Italy]. Rome: Manifestolibri. Paasi, Anssi. 1998. “Boundaries as Social Processes: Territoriality in the World of Flows.” Geopolitics 3 (1): 69–88. Pincet, Stephanie S. 1994. “Challenges to Citizenship: Latino Immigrants and Political Organizing in the Los Angeles Area.” Environment and Planning A 26 (6): 895–914. Purcell, Mark. 2003. “Citizenship and the Right to the Global City: Re-imagining the Capitalist World Order.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27 (3): 564–590. Rocco, Raymond. 1999. “The Formation of Latino Citizenship in Southeast Los Angeles.” Citizenship Studies 3 (2): 253–266. Rodríguez, Cristina M., Muzaffar Chishti, and Kimberly Nortman. 2010. “Limits on Immigration Federalism.” In Taking Local Control: Immigration and Policy Activism in U.S. Cities and States, edited by Monica W. Varsanyi, 31–50. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rumford, Chris. 2006. “Theorizing Borders.” European Journal of Social Theory 9 (2): 155–169. Salter, Mark B. 2008. “When the Exception Becomes the Rule: Borders, Sovereignty, and Citizenship.” Citizenship Studies 12 (4): 365–380. Sassen, Saskia. 2006. Territory, Authority, Rights. From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Siemiatycki, Myer, and Engin Isin. 1997. “Immigration, Diversity and Urban Citizenship in Toronto.” Canadian Journal of Regional Science 20 (1–2): 73–102. Stradella, Elettra. 2010. “Il potere di ordinanza dei sindaci e l’amministrazione emergenziale [Mayors’ Power of Order and the Emergency Administration].” Rivista trimestrale di Scienza dell’Amministrazione 3: 101–121. Vandelli, Luciano. 2009. “I poteri del sindaco in materia di ordine e sicurezza pubblica nel nuovo art. 54 del tuel [Mayors’ powers on Public Order and Public Security within the Renovated article 54 of Tuel].” Studi, ricerche e relazioni. www.astrid-online.it. Van Houtum, Henk, and Ton Van Naerssen. 2001. “Bordering, Ordering and Othering.” Tijdschrift voor Economiche en Sociale Geografie 93 (2): 125–136. Varsanyi, Monica W. 2006. “Interrogating ‘Urban Citizenship’ vis-àvis Undocumented Migration.” Citizenship Studies 10 (2): 229–249. Varsanyi, Monica W. 2007. “Documenting Undocumented Immigrants: The Matriculas Consulares as Neoliberal Local Membership.” Geopolitics 12 (2): 299–319. Varsanyi, Monica W. 2010. Taking Local Control: Immigration and Policy Activism in U.S. Cities and States. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. CITIZENSHIP STUDIES 17 Vrenna, Massimiliano. 2003. “Rapporti tra stranieri e anagrafe: spunti problematici [Relations between Foreigners and Municipal Registration: Problematic Reflections].” Gli Stranieri 4: 407–420. Walters, William. 2002. “Mapping Schengenland: Denaturalizing the Border.” Environment and Planning: Society and Space 20 (5): 561–580. Wang, Fei-Ling. 2004. “Reformed Migration Control and New Targeted People: China’s Hukou System in the 2000s.” The China Quarterly 177: 115–132.