This project aims to investigate how migrant workers in a condition of legal irregularity experience and respond to increasingly complex migration policies—that is, policies that are often ambiguous, paradoxical, and practically unworkable despite their official framing. Specifically, it will explore:
1. How irregular migrant workers experience these policies in their everyday lives: what they think about them, how they live with and interpret them, what kinds of relationships they establish with institutions, and what implications these policies have on their daily realities.
2. What forms of agency emerge in response to these policies: how migrants resist, navigate, and attempt to transform them through both individual and collective strategies.
3. How both experiences and forms of agency vary by race, gender, and class examining how the policies and responses are shaped by intersectional elements.
To pursue these aims, the project focuses on the urban food economy in Milan and New York.
This sector includes a wide range of roles—from restaurant kitchens to cleaning services and app-based food delivery—and is characterized by high levels of informality, dependence on migrant labor, and varying degrees of visibility and exposure to state control. It offers a strategic lens to examine how intersecting forms of precarity and resistance unfold within the context of populist far right paradox.
New York and Milan are two cities located in national contexts marked by increasingly paradoxical and far-right migration policies, but also characterized by active civil societies engaged in the defense of migrants’ rights and labor markets where informality and migrant labor are deeply embedded.
1. How irregular migrant workers experience these policies in their everyday lives: what they think about them, how they live with and interpret them, what kinds of relationships they establish with institutions, and what implications these policies have on their daily realities.
2. What forms of agency emerge in response to these policies: how migrants resist, navigate, and attempt to transform them through both individual and collective strategies.
3. How both experiences and forms of agency vary by race, gender, and class examining how the policies and responses are shaped by intersectional elements.
To pursue these aims, the project focuses on the urban food economy in Milan and New York.
This sector includes a wide range of roles—from restaurant kitchens to cleaning services and app-based food delivery—and is characterized by high levels of informality, dependence on migrant labor, and varying degrees of visibility and exposure to state control. It offers a strategic lens to examine how intersecting forms of precarity and resistance unfold within the context of populist far right paradox.
New York and Milan are two cities located in national contexts marked by increasingly paradoxical and far-right migration policies, but also characterized by active civil societies engaged in the defense of migrants’ rights and labor markets where informality and migrant labor are deeply embedded.