Polish and Albanian Workers in Italy: Between Legality and Undocumented Status.

This study concentrates on Albanian and Polish immigrants in Italy. We look at both legal and undocumented workers and examine their efforts to acquire or maintain legal work and stay status once in the host country as well as their overall migratory projects and the ways in which these intersect with Italian immigration policy and authorities. We analyse what we have termed the immigrant ‘survival’ strategies concerning entry, stay, employment and socialisation in the host country. Our analysis is based on the immigrants’ own accounts of their experiences, plans, attitudes and opinions as registered in two sets of loosely structured life-story interviews. Naturally our study confronts these accounts with the findings of previous studies regarding the micro-level of immigration policy implementation in Italy (Triandafyllidou 2003) and the overall immigration context in this country. More specifically, we analyse here how immigrants make sense of their migration experience, what are their motivations and how these change through the process of migration, how they re-define their personal, social, occupational or ethnic/national identity through the experience of migration and how they position themselves in relation to the host society on one hand, and the society of origin, on the other. Moreover, we look into the ways in which policy design and implementation offer or indeed close windows of opportunity to immigrants. Taking into account the specific policy provisions regarding entry, stay and immigrant employment in Italy as well as the practices of implementation adopted by the public administration, we study how immigrants prepare and execute their migration plans, how they find accommodation and employment once in Italy and how they continuously adapt their plans to changes in job opportunities, their own wishes and needs as well as more general changes in the conditions of entry and stay in the host country. We try thus to highlight the interactive nature of immigration policy and the need for it to take into account the dynamic character of its targets, namely the immigrants – both regular and undocumented – in order to achieve its objectives.