Bypassing European restrictive mobility rules through “inherited” Italian passports

Résumé 0

In this paper, I argue that nationality and immigration laws should be analyzed together. In fact, nationality laws aim at determining who is member of one State, thus accessing the goods such State may distribute and who is not, thus remaining a foreigner with limited possibilities to access these goods. Immigration laws, on the other hand, determine who can enter a specific country and with which rights. Building on an ethnographic fieldwork I carried out with thirty binational Chileans and Argentinians of Italian descent, this paper shows that the ways they use the Italian nationality law contributes to the resumption of young Italians emigration (and mobility) in the EU. More generally, it illustrates how citizenship laws may become migration laws through the way people seize them. So, even if the primary goal of citizenship laws is to define national boundaries determining who is (or can be) a national citizen and who is not (or cannot be) one, the manners people handle them may convert them in laws that regulate migration, in the sense of both the possibility to emigrate from one country and the possibility to immigrate in another.