Migrant Democracy: Constitutional Promise and Political Struggle in Contemporary Italy

Abstract The article addresses the tension between the internalization of a violent border regime intent on preempting migrant arrivals and the everyday democratic struggle against that regime. It builds on ethnographic fieldwork in Rome to illuminate conflicting political imaginations and existing practices of the already plural, albeit unequal, Italian polity. On the one hand, we see a bordered democracy. This democracy keeps investing in nationalizing itself, by fortifying the Mediterranean as a lethal border and by shoring up social, economic, and racialized boundaries. On the other hand, there is also an emerging migrant democracy. This migrant democracy actively works on two interrelated fronts: to build a more democratic, pluralistic, and egalitarian polity, and to reform how legal and physical access to the polity is governed in the first place. The article argues that, on both fronts, the anti-Fascist Constitution of Italy offers a viable political and ideological framework. More generally, the article proposes that if democratic politics and constitutional arguments are to produce more than a rhetorical edifice for democracy, they need to attend to the social, economic, and racialized inequalities of life in common.