The border right through us

Closing the CPTs has become a priority in the political agenda since 1998, the year in which they were instituted by the Turco Napolitano immigration law.
Melting Pot has followed the issue from 1998 up to today with many reportages and campaigns.

From Bologna to Trieste, through Milan, Turin, Bari Palese, Lampedusa, Modena, Brindisi, Gradisca, every place, every city, every territory in which the rebellion against the CPT took place became our own.

We always called the CPTs “lagers”, exposing their real function and making the fight to obtain their dismanteling a real matter of dignity and a fight for the emprovement of civil society.
Yet, today the debate surrounding the issue of CPTs asks for a re-interpretation of their role, a more adeguate one that suits modern times.

Re-interpreting the role of the CPTs doesn’t mean that we can consider the battle against them to be over; instead, by re-interpreting the reality around them, the issues that they raise – and, along with that, the issue of citizenship rights – and the need to close them down is re-affirmed with a new strength, the strenght that characterized the 10 years of civil movements that contrasted their institution.

The debate regarding the CPTs is changing: on one hand, last years’ campaigns, all the sabotages against them – and against whoever makes money out of them – has forced the issue into the political debite. On the other hand, the Italian government acknowledges the issues of the CPTs, but in a fake, superficial, powerless way.

All the work that has been done by the De Mistura commission, the confusion about terms such as “emptying” or “closure”, all that is used as an attempt to bring the issue to a compromise, therefore answering to the ones that have been constantly asking for the closure of these structure in a much less than satisfactory way.

According to the government, emptying the CPTs means primarily facing the public disdain and rejection of their existance and, at the same time, legitimating their existance by re-defining their characteristics and the context they operate in.

The CPTs, as they are, cannot exist anymore – says the commission together with the radical left parties – making the issue a matter of inefficiency and costs; what is left unsaid is that if the CPTs as we know them don’t exist anymore, it will be because a more sophisticated system of regulation of the global migratory flows is under construction.
This is not the right time to discuss all the proposals (all to be verified) that the government has already presented; it’s rather the time to take into account all the processes that are taking place, which sketch out a quite discomforting reality, but also lay out new possibilities for civil society movements.

European interlude
It’s been notorious for a long time that the debate surrounding CPTs is not just a national issue, all the laws that regulate the migratory flows root have their foundations on the continental level. It is very clear that it’s not a solution to bring the issue to Brussels, as many try to say with the goal of bypassing the national government, but it’s evident that it’s only on the European level that we can talk about issues of citizenship, its denial, and the different levels of inclusion and exclusion that this topic brings about.
The enlargement of the EU towards East and the impossibility to expell Rumenian and Bulgarian citizens – which is the result of the economic processes, of the marketing broadening strategy of the EU, but also of the uncontrollable flow from and towards East – is a scary element for the Italian debate (and also for other European countries), which is focused on the impossibility of making courageous choices when it comes to immigration.

According to the political parties that are more sensitive to the issue of the CPTs – or that are smarter and faster in understanding what a great support they can get from the civil society movements in times of elections – their participation in the policy making should have made the option of closing down these lagers more concrete. But that didn’t happen: the enlargement of the EU towards East, and the economic processes that accompany that, ridicules and overwhelms every effort made by the Italian government and its most radical components, bringing the debate surrounding the issue to a higher level, both metropolitan and continental at the same time.

The CPT is all around you…
According to the Italian debate, the new CPTs, emptied and redesigned, should be part of a regulatory framework that deals with immigration flows in a more human way.
What we have now is a normative framework that establishes different levels of rights acquisition. But we can only outline the overall design of this process only if we consider the migrant as a figure and the context he has to deal with.
We are not just talking about law then: life conditions are influenced by policies, by culture, by safety as an independent variable, they depend on the context we live in.

Looking at the issue from this point of view underlines what the real function of the CPTs is, beyond the rhetorical and demagogical aspects of the debate.
Far from being instruments to expel people from the European territory, the CPTs are meant to be disciplinary instruments to manage “transitoriness”, in a European context that is mostly oriented to granting rights only temporarily.

There is no such thing as a European fortress locked up in its boundaries; there is not even the need to fight against immigration; but there is the need to set the best conditions to manage it.

The border moves in a changeable way, accompanying whoever crosses it as if it was part of their biography; what comes out is a reality made of different legislations and life conditions, going from the “illegal aliens” to those who are fully entitled with civil rights.

Emptying the CPTs then means nothing but framing them into a broader system of discipline and control.
Today, the CPT is all around us, it’s made of ghettos and exclusion, of differentiated inclusion and stratifications of citizenship levels.
It’s then useful to reframe their function, and more generally their relation with the law, in a context that presents the metropolitan area as a space which is constantly redesigned according to the human beings that inhabit it.
We’re also talking about those who are untruly inexistent: there is indeed a great number of people that are permanently included in the continuous production process in the metropolitan area, but are systematically, or temporarily, or partially excluded from being recognized as citizens.

Ghettos, entire neighbourhoods and city areas that are inhabited by immigrants, because they are forced to, play an important role in the process of inclusion/exclusion as well. The “old CPTs” have been the exceptional resolutive solution, the “new CPTs” are their close relatives, or, better, the new system designed around the emptying of the CPTs is presented as a “process”, a multiform network of devices, spread all over the social structure. The CPTs are an integral part of this network, strictly connected to the social context around them.
As a matter of fact, in order to empty a ghetto such as the one in via Anelli in Padova, they had to build walls and place some check points, and now it’s needed to involve the whole city in a new control system, made of roundups to catch illegal immigrants, and patrols, and post pardon scare, and state of emergency.
So, in order to empty the CPTs, it is going to be necessary to articulate a new, more sophisticated system of social, cultural, political control over migrants, that have become the object around which new instruments that regulate metropolitan life are designed, new instruments that need to be legitimate and consensual.
Emphasizing the value of safety is part of the cultural structure this strategy relies on; privately organized city safety, roundups, Masonic associations for urban patron are the practical side of it.
Participating in the management of a big CPT, meaning the space we live in, is what we’re being offered as opposed to the emptying of the CPTs, an option nobody ever asked for.
As we already said, the issue of closing the CPTs remains unresolved , and also the need to rethink about the concept of European citizenship as a way of getting new rights for new citizens.

But the metropolitan area is the one being really involved and overwhelmed by this process, and it’s the public good consisting in sharing our life spaces that presents itself as a new context in which we can confront the reality of the rejection of the CPTs... all around us...