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Stampato a Milano nel mese di Agosto 1997
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Working group 2

The Social Integration of Immigrants and the Response of Institutions. Report.

Carla Collicelli
CENSIS, Italy

The rich and wide ranging composition of the working group, including people from all over the world, compelled consideration initially on the distinctions and affinities between context and culture. For example, the Mediterranean is a place for immigration borne out of tragedy, of the inhuman pressure created from the underdevelopment of the South, of illegal trafficking. Europe, in turn, is the centre of problems of a political nature about the question of immigration, and which concern the development of democracy, the matter of tolerance, that of integration and the multi-cultural society.

This is all to be used as an aid to the structure of the debate, and it must in no way penalise efforts towards comparison. Modern and advanced societies, personally touched by today’s immigration, share an aspect which is that of complexity, arising out of the aggregation of local micro-situations and from the lack of a national cultural identity.

In all the actions to be taken, it is necessary therefore to acquire a view of a regional type, and in the Metropolis project in particular to take the city as the main protagonist of the phenomena and policies.

The priorities for the research and direction of the policies, in terms of criteria and methods as identified by the group, are thus the following:

• interdisciplinarity, as a connecting key between differing issues, as opposed to specialising;

• the longitudinal historical perspective, for learning from the past, looking at the evolutionary stages of the processes;

• balanced research into the first and second generation, with particular attention for the matter of identity;

• the balance between research into immigrants and into the host societies, with special attention on the bidirectionality of the processes;

• the clarification of legal models, whether they are implicit, such as the definition of integration for example, or explicit, such as laws on entry, selection and formal processes of integration;

• attention to verbal rhetoric, to concrete practices and the actual results, even the unwanted ones;

• the necessity to do in-depth research and to avoid generalisations;

• the care in choosing the countries to study.

Regarding concrete themes to study, the group has expressed the following proposals:

• the relationship between territorial organisation of the immigrants and social and economic integration, between ethnic control and the risk of segregation;

• the relationship between employment and social integration and the role of education;

• cultural ways, identities and changes in immigrant families, loss of native culture and potency of ethnicity;

• participation in national and local politics, the role of intermediate organisations and public spaces;

• assessment of the various institutional responses in the fields of education, health, social services, language teaching and checks on the efficacy of the "ethnic match";

• public attitude towards immigrants, intolerance and discrimination, both personally and at a systematic level;

• evaluation of the various intercultural and anti-racist programmes;

• the role of scheduling immigratory flows compared to integration.

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