Temporaneous Existences: Migrants’ Access to and Exclusion from Healthcare Services in Turin, Italy

Abstract:

In the last decade, migration has become one of the most intensely contested topics in the European public sphere. The categorization of this phenomenon as a “crisis” has allowed to focus on emergency measures and border security instead of building a system capable of integrating and caring for vulnerable people arriving in the continent. The media spectacle focused on dramatic scenes that unfolded at the borders of the European Union (EU) and within refugee camps hastily built to accommodate (or keep away) those arriving by land and by sea often overshadows forms of reception and exclusion that occur in the metropole’s mainland. My research in Italy investigates the interface between immigrants and the state beyond narratives of arrival, and it builds on and contributes to the substantial and still-growing academic field that examines migration and borders in Europe. The question I address in my thesis is whether welfare services, and in particular healthcare services, act as boundaries separating citizens and noncitizens. In other words, what is the role of healthcare in defining the “migrant” in contemporary Italy? To answer this question, between May and August 2020 I conducted participant observation while volunteering with Camminare Insieme (“Walking Together”), a secular charitable organization providing care to immigrants and other people unable to access national healthcare services in Turin, Italy. I also accompanied undocumented immigrants as they accessed public hospitals, interviewed people working at other religious and public organizations meant to relieve the disease burden of marginalized groups, and participated in meetings bringing all these public and private actors together. Through my thesis, I argue that healthcare services participate in creating the unstable temporalities that define noncitizens—mainly those who are “undocumented”—giving rise to what I call temporaneous existences. My ethnographic study of healthcare provision brings to light forms of temporal discontinuity that characterize the lived experience of migrants in northern Italy, a conditional hospitality extended within the confines of the nation-state and its power structures, and one that helps uphold them.