UNDOCUMENTED: BUREAUCRATIC ENCOUNTERS AND MIGRANT LABOUR IN SOUTHERN ITALY

This research project will investigate the dynamics of undocumented migrant agricultural labour in
the region of Calabria, Southern Italy, and how the position of these migrant workers - in terms of
their living and working conditions, and within global agricultural supply chains - is sustained by
their lack of documentation. Scholars of migration in Italy and elsewhere have highlighted how the
country's bureaucratic immigration regime, through inconsistency and incomprehensibility, serves
to produce a precarious workforce which is best viewed as a function of statecraft, rather than
occurring 'outside' of the state. Building on such theories, this project will explore the ways in which
these regimes are negotiated in practice, and what such negotiations and tactics tell us about
broader anthropological tropes of agency and bureaucracy. Focusing on labour practices, temporary
camps, policies (official and unofficial, local and national), and 'bureaucratic encounters', this project will unpack the production of commodities and workforces, and how the movements of
both are sustained by the lack, or presence, of paperwork.
Research Problem:
Agriculture is crucial to the economic performance of Italy; agricultural products made up 1.9% of
Italy's total GDP in 2018, with employment in the sector increasing by 4.2% and gross investment in
the sector growing by 4.1% (value) in the same year. In 2010, 43% of Italy's land area was devoted to
agriculture which was the second greatest area in the (then) EU27; in the same year, the Italian
agricultural labour force accounted for 14% of the economically active population. In Calabria, the
region in which this research will be based, 8.3% of the regular workforce was represented by
agricultural labour in 2010.
Within this context it is hard to overstate the importance of foreign agricultural labourers. For
example, one estimate by the Italian Union of Farmers puts the proportion of foreign labourers in
the agricultural sector at 36%. Many of these migrants will be employed in Italy under the guise of
permanent and seasonal work permits. However, it is a common occurrence that when these expire
(the 'permanent' ones need to be renewed every two years), a significant number of migrant
workers opt to stay in the country illegally rather than return to their country of origin. This process
means that many of those who remain end up in one of many agricultural slums, ripe for
exploitation. As such, the Global Slavery Index calculated that there were 50,000 agricultural
workers enslaved in Italy in 2018. It should come as no surprise that through weak regulation and
obscure, nebulous networks of distribution, the
fruits of this slave labour find their way into
legitimate supply chains.