Making Sense of Italy as a Host Country. A Qualitative Analysis of Immigrant Discourse.

This report concentrates on the immigrant ‘survival’ strategies concerning entry, stay, employment and socialisation in the host country. The study has a double aim. First, it complements our analysis of the daily routines of implementation in the Italian public administration in general, and in the Foreigners’ Office of the Florence Police Headquarters (Questura) in particular. Second, it aims at analysing immigrants’ projects, plans and tactics of adaptation and survival in the host country through the immigrants’ own voice as registered in two sets of loosely structured life-story interviews. Concerning the first aim, this report studies how 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 policy design and implementation. Immigration policy needs to take into account the dynamic character of its targets, namely the immigrants – both regular and undocumented – in order to achieve its objectives. Concerning the second aim of this report, through the analysis of the interview transcripts, we shall study 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.