The Emergency Management of Migration and Agricultural Workforce during the Pandemic

The Contradictory Outcomes of the 2020 Amnesty Law

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Abstract

The chapter aims to illustrate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and, in particular, of the of amnesty law passed by the Italian government in May 2020 for migrants working in agriculture, highlighting the continuity of the latter measure with the previous policies regulating migration and agricultural labour. For decades, these policies have managed both international migrations and domestic mobility of the seasonal labour force through an emergency approach. The chapter resorts on data collected through statistics, interviews and participant observation inside informal settlements in the South of Italy. In conclusion, we argue that the health emergency accelerates the resort to administrative and bureaucratic emergency practices in the management of migrations, thus contributing to the reproduction of an emergency frame, that relegates labourers to the role of ‘victims of exploitation’, and at the same time regulates their possibility of movement and their employment opportunities.


Open access | Peer reviewed

Presentato: 15 Luglio 2021 | Accettato: 30 Luglio 2021 | Pubblicato 27 Ottobre 2021 | Lingua: en

Keywords Migrant farmworkers • Amnesty • Emergency • Reception system • Agriculture • Informal settlements

Copyright © 2021 Emanuela Dal Zotto, Martina Lo Cascio, Valeria Piro. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-532-2/014


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