Transcript Diapositiva 1

Transnational and rejoined
families
Maurizio Ambrosini, university of Milan, editor of the
journal “Mondi migranti”
Immigration and immigrant
families
“we wanted arms, but actually families have
arrived ”
• The transition from the immigration of
singles to the immigration of families as a
crucial passage: immigration become
settled
• immigrant families: a resource for
integration, or the nest of parallel lives?
A paradoxical relationship
• Today, over 50% of immigrants in Italy are women
• They arrive more and more alone, as breadwinner
• They find jobs in Italian families, now more and more with the
elderly: a niche of the labour market not very hit by the
economic crisis
• Many of them have familiy charges: they have to entrust their
children to other caregivers (mainly, maternal grandmothers)
• So they form the so-called “transnational families”
• The reaffirmation here of the family as the crucial site for care
is based on the destabilization of families there
(see: M.Ambrosini, Immigrazione irregolare e welfare invisibile: il lavoro di cura
attraverso i confini, Il Mulino, 2013).
Transnational families
• Migrant families as “imagined
communities” or social units struggling to
save their emotional and social bonds?
• Frontiering and relativising
• The crucial role of caring (also at a distance)
• The multiple kinds of care: phone calls,
gifts, visits, skype and chat….
• The suffering of transnational mothering
Three types of transnational
families
• Circulating families
• Intergenerational families
• Families centered on children
From transnational families to
family reunion
• In a democratic State, it is possible to obstruct and
delay family reunions, but not to prevent them (role
of the Courts in the ‘60)
• So transnational families tend to transform into
reunited families
• Now, reunions with “reversed roles”: the husband as
the reuniteds member, and the following problems
• The “three families of migrants”
• The reunion is not a happy end, but a new beginning
Families in emigration
• Conventional visions: between “bearers of
social problems” and “true traditional
families”
• Dynamic interaction between diverse
practices and ways of life
• The practical emancipation of working
wives, against the marginal life of reunited
wives staying at home as housewives