Chapter 8 - Reach Out When There Is No Way to Reach: Social Media and Migration Activism in Italy and East Asia

Summary

‘A Brave New World’ during the Pandemic

‘We are a country of inequality, and, alas, we have always been like that’, lamented Dania, an activist at HOME, a Milan-based association that, during the last 12 years, has been fighting for the recognition of migrants’ status and their rights in Italy. ‘What we see today, after twenty months of global pandemic, is just the ultimate revelation of a system which discriminates against and marginalizes those who are vulnerable, by denying them the basic social and legal rights that every human being deserves’ (10 August 2021, on Webex, interviewed by the authors). Beyond the Italian case, in high-income economies in East Asia, the inequality commonly suffered by migrant workers also worsened during the pandemic. When border closures interrupted migrant labour recruitment and led to labour shortages, migrant workers who remained in the receiving states, such as Southeast Asian construction workers in Singapore, might have been able to get a higher wage reflective of the decreased labour supply. However, as pointed out by Alex Au of Transient Workers Count Too, a Singaporean advocacy organization, ‘the number one priority is not the happiness of workers. If your project slows down, it's a temporary problem. But if you allow the wage to go up, then it's a permanent problem. The priority is not to allow it to go up. The government does not allow the market to operate efficiently’ (emphasis added, 28 September 2021, on Webex). As a matter of fact, the spread of the coronavirus around the world generated a new global ‘risk society’ (Beck et al. 1992), wherein a multilayered socio-economic and health crisis developed in the fertile ground of rigid ‘mobility regimes’ (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013), which regulate the entry, employment, residency and citizenship of foreign workers. During the pandemic, the rigidity and discrimination of the two distinctive regimes implemented in Italy and East Asia led to inequality between citizens and migrants, both of whom bore the brunt but in various forms, to various degrees, with different legal statuses.