I "confini" della cittadinanza: perché l'immigrazione disturba

The European model of migratory flows’ management, traditionally based on the guest worker’s image, has procrastinated the question of foreigners’ inclusion into the framework of citizenship rights, namely the question of welfare’s boundaries. The evolution of migrations, their transformation into a stable and composite presence, and above all the emergence of a second generation, have forced European countries to enrich the hamper of rights acknowledged to migrants and their families. Anyway has not led to the resolution of the historic paradox of the European experience: the attempt to keep together the economic logic on which the European model of entries regulation is based, with the olidarity logic that stresses the primacy of personhood on the States’ prerogative to “choose” their citizens and to decide foreigners’ treatment. An attempt that has always produced compromising solutions which show, at the same time, the nature of cultural and political artefact of national citizenship and the paradoxical outcomes resulting from the application of the logic of means-tested access to rights.