Operatori-attivisti, burocrazie e migranti

This article is the result of a long participant observation developed in two phases: the first as an operator and expert from June 2020 to January 2021 and the subsequent as a researcher and volunteer from February 2021 to June 2022 at the Access Point to Services for Foreigners in Messina. The short essay investigates the complex links between social work and civic activism in an area of intervention dominated by legislation that produces clandestinely and irregularities for foreigners. Evident contradictions emerge in relations with public institutions between the financing of projects for the inclusion of foreigners and the daily impediments to at least legal inclusion due to the discretion of many bureaucratic procedures. To bring to the surface the human cost of institutional racism – the heart of the migration government of contemporary Italy – and conversely the alliances and forms of resistance implemented, the story is told of an elderly man of Tunisian origin who, after 33 years of life in Italy, finds himself living on the street and without documents and, despite everything, he tries together with the operators-activists of the service to re-emerge from his state of irregularity.