We report a contribution for Vittorio Cogliati Dezza’s CeSPI (Center for Studies of International Politics) in which our INVOLVE project is mentioned as a good territorial practice.

The article also addresses the issues of hospitality, inequalities and territorial development in a timely and interesting manner.

Enjoy the reading!

The starting point that come from Sebastiano Ceschi’s intervention are an excellent opportunity to explore rapidly evolving dynamics that cannot stand accommodating or traditional readings. On pain of not being able to understand in which processes we are placed.

My point of view is partial, it does not claim any completeness, and starts from a specific observatory: the territory, which suggests some ideas. Seen by an environmentalist from Legambiente as I am.

The first thing I realized, when I approached the drama of migrations (Lampedusa 2012), was that the solidarity and values ​​approach, although indispensable, was not sufficient and that, after the first welcome, it was essential to understand what would happen in the relationships between people in the territories. And that the knots to be solved in the second reception would not be exhausted with proper and dignified management of it, because the entire social and territorial system of the country is involved.

The reason lies in the fact that before being citizens, foreigners, guests, beneficiaries, the presence of migrants tells us that we are all inhabitants of a territory on which a community is established, knowingly or not, with equal responsibility, in the use and in the care of the environment, relationships, services, emergencies, even if diversified in terms of access to rights and guarantees. And either we live “separated at home” or we cooperate and build communities and new identities, which are not given by the place of birth. (…) And the community is built together, through the care of horizontal relationships of proximity, as dramatically the COVID-19 reminded us this year.

In a territory, then, they coexist (perhaps separated at home) and conflict with different levels of fragility, individual and collective, social and cultural or environmental. And here is the second teaching. The frailties of people make a community fragile. A territory with fragility is more fragile for everyone.

For two reasons.

Because those who live in conditions of economic or existential fragility have no energy to devote to the community, they themselves become a factor in accelerating the individualistic tensions that accelerate the crisis of social cohesion because they are forced, willy-nilly, to give priority to their own survival. This is what has happened in recent years in the urban and territorial peripheries with the exponential growth of inequalities, in the different forms in which they have unfolded: generational and gender, territorial and cultural, social and economic. By provoking the multiplication of conflicts between the last and the penultimate, with migrants often part in the dispute on which to discharge anger and social insecurities.

The second reason lies in the fact that the more levels of fragility exist in a territory, the more the community of that territory is fragmented, the less cohesive it is in the care and enhancement of common wealth (see Forum Inequalities and Diversity), the less resilient it is to changes and emergencies, because it is dispersed and segregated in incommunicable islands, the result of the multiplication of borders, visible and invisible, between urban areas and internal areas, between suburbs and affluent centers and, within the same territory, between lifestyles, access to rights and services, national groups, cultures.

Borders and separations that create fears, resentments and new segregations, such as the school one we have seen in recent years: Italians with Italians, foreigners with foreigners. The fragility of immigrants in our territories has highlighted a pre-existing fragility of communities burdened by social and environmental injustices, already fragmented into watertight compartments. And today it raises the urgency of a change of pace: placing migration policies within new public policies to combat inequalities (see some ideas in the European project Involve, promoted in Italy by Legambiente), overcoming the disastrous placement in the competences of the Ministry of ‘Indoor.

Another lesson that comes to us from the experience of recent years is that even in social and demographic processes, as in politics, there is no void. If a country leaves entire areas without ideal and socio-economic investment, such as happened with inland areas, there will still be someone willing to inhabit them. This is what happened with the migrants, settled (with SPRAR and CAS projects) in small municipalities, where they represented a possibility of “restart” for many territories, with the arrival of young people, families, children: a salvation for many children. common. At what cost? That of the only Keynesian policy that Italy has been able to implement in these decades of liberal policies. With a minimum investment, a public policy was launched, which had managed to transform immigration into a powerful factor for the rebirth of demographically and economically depressed territories (see Legambiente Dossier The welcome that is good for Italy).

The condition of the migrant, therefore, is also ours, not so much because we are all exposed to the ecological and climatic crisis, to the Covid-19 emergency, to the economic crisis (just look at the growth of Italians in poverty), but above all because today – with greater or lesser intensity depending on the social ladder we occupy (last, penultimate, vulnerable) – we all need public policies that counteract inequalities at the pre-distributive level (see Forum DD 15 proposals for social justice), reversing the drift of these years and placing the transition towards greater environmental and social justice at the center of collective hope.

And it is worrying that the European Union – which has had the great merit with the Next Generation EU program of identifying the path and entrusting the ecological transition and digital innovation with the guide of a process that will only be able to raise the fortunes of European citizens whether it will be inclusive, that is, valid for everyone and everyone – has programmatically excluded the issue of migrants from its horizon of just transition. Indeed, with the Pact for Migration and Asylum, it is moving as if nothing had changed in this year!

COVID-19 tells us every day how indispensable public policies are and it also made us understand how much it costs not to prevent and to let the choices on some social goods, such as health (…) It tells us that prevention is not a concession for Countries with full bellies, but a necessity for everyone, and the same goes for immigration, which is not a concession to do-gooders, but a public investment, in some “selfish” way, which gives hope to the future in aging communities, that need lymph and energy. (…)

If we were really selfish, then we should invest in the integration of migrants.