Migrants ‘at Stake’: Agency and Autonomy in Ventimiglia

Since 2011, the migration government in the EU have increasingly strengthened specific territorial control strategies, primarily based on the implementation of a more rigid policy framework aimed at managing migrants’ mobility, in particular, secondary movements between the different Member States. Over the years, migration policies have activated a process of selective and differential inclusion of people - asylum seekers, “legal/illegal” migrants - at the EU as well as at the national level through which differentiated forms of access and rights have been (re)produced. In this scenario, internal EU-borders have become privileged spaces of inquiry because they made especially visible mechanisms of governance and division of migrants into different categories. By adopting a border studies perspective, the paper aims at bringing out the tensions between the autonomy in migration and the violence inherent in the migration system. The study is based on fieldwork research conducted in Ventimiglia (September-December 2018) during which I met and interviewed people with different legal status (“dublinated” people, asylum-seekers, “illegal” migrants, “rejected” migrants). Regardless of the status defined by the law, each one has a particular story which brought him/her in Ventimiglia and, above all, goals, desires and socio-economic capitals determining the further steps to follow. How is the relationship between the “force of law” – that lays down timetable and spaces of the migrants’ presence - and the power of migrants desires and decisions? What remains of the “autonomy in migration” in a policy framework increasingly hostile towards migrants?