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IMMIGRATION

‘We’re Italian too’: Second-generation migrants renew calls for citizenship

Italy's politicians are under increased pressure to recognise more children of migrants, born and educated in the country, as Italian citizens.

'We're Italian too': Second-generation migrants renew calls for citizenship
People demonstrate in favour of reforming Italy's citizenship law. File photo: Filippo Monteforte/AFP
Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, Italy's second generation of legal immigrants is renewing the fight for automatic citizenship in a country where migration is at the heart of the political debate.
 
“Ius soli!”, the Latin term which literally means “right of soil,” or birthright citizenship, has become the new rallying cry among the children of
Italy's 5.3 million legal immigrants, who are denied the right to apply for citizenship until they turn 18.
 
 
Anti-racism protesters take part in a Black Lives Matter protest in Piazza del Popolo, Rome, in June. Photo: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP
 
In early June, thousands of demonstrators marched in Rome in memory of African American George Floyd, who died on May 25 when a white policeman
kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes, triggering an outcry in the United States and around the world.
 
The march spurred renewed vigour among the children and grandchildren of migrants in Italy, who share the language and country's cultural references
but do not have the right to apply for citizenship until they are 18 years old.
 
Even then, it is subject to strict conditions and often gained only after a lengthy and heavily bureaucratic process.Italian-born children of migrants involved in stopping the hijack of a school bus in 2018 were promised citizenship as a “reward” for their bravery.
 
“In this country, citizenship is treated not as a right, but a concession,” said Fatima Maiga, who was born in Italy but is of Ivorian origin.
 
Legal immigrants say their plight has been overshadowed by the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean Sea, which since 2014 has seen more than half a
million new immigrants arriving on Italy's shores.
 
They claim their fight for citizenship is also weighed down by anti-immigrant sentiment at home, fomented by certain politicians – most notably by the far-right League party,which left government in 2019 after only a year in power.
 
While in power, League leader Matteo Salvini brought in an anti-immigration decree which makes the path to citizenship more difficult for many legal migrants.
 
 
 
 
Of the 5.3 million foreigners living in Italy in 2019, around 1.3 million were under 18 and three quarters of those were born in the country.
 
Among those most affected are the children of Albanian, Moroccan, Chinese, Indian and Pakistani immigrants.
 
Maiga, 28, co-founded Italiani Senza Cittadinanza, or Italians Without Citizenship, in 2016 to help second-generation migrants  – known as the G2 –
become Italian.
 
Under a 1992 law, anyone born in Italy can apply for citizenship at the age of 18, on condition of having legally lived here “without interruption”.
 
However, the process must be launched before they turn 19.
 
Up until that point, they are given residence permits.
 
If that window is missed, people can also become a citizen on the grounds of legal residency for a decade and on the condition of a minimum income of
8,500 euros ($10,000) a year over three years.
 
Nevertheless, the process can take a long time and involve complicated paperwork.
 
Photo: Filippo Monteforte/AFP
 
“I applied when I was 18. I had to wait for four years before getting my papers,” Marwa Mahmoud, 35, told AFP. 
 
“I know what it's like to live as an Italian in everything but in law,” Egyptian-born Mahmoud said.
 
Mahmoud and others also worry the ongoing migrant crisis – in which hundreds of people have been arriving on Italy's shores every day – is pushing their
own struggle further down the agenda.
 
 The numbers of people arriving in this way have risen by nearly 150 percent over the past year, the majority coming by boat from Tunisia, Italy's interior
ministry said last week.
 
“Our situation is being passed over in silence,” Mahmoud lamented.
 
 
'Not a priority'
 
“Since Italy started getting embroiled in the migrant crisis it's like we're starting at zero again,” she said, adding that Italians “tend to put
everyone in the same basket”.
 
“But the situation of an unaccompanied minor who arrived yesterday is not comparable with that of an immigrant child born and raised here,” she said.
 
During his year-long tenure in 2018-2019 as interior minister, Matteo Salvini, the head of the League party, pushed through new rules extending the
waiting time to process Italian nationality applications from two to four years.
 
Supported by the second-generation (G2) network, Italy's governing centre-left Democratic Party (PD) is now pushing for reforms – among them, advocating for five-year continuous residency to qualify for citizenship.
 
But so far, the PD's coalition partner, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, has been non-committal.
 
Still, a fairer birthright citizenship system has been under discussion in parliament in recent years.
 
But “it's not a priority”, said Giuseppe Brescia, a Five Star deputy, who heads parliament's committee on constitutional affairs.
 
The G2 movement now plans to hold a demonstration on September 19th in the hope of advancing the cause of what it calls Italy's “forgotten non-citizens.”

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ITALIAN CITIZENSHIP

How ancestry detectives help Americans and Brits find their Italian roots

Whether it's for a citizenship application or just to satisfy curiosity, tracking down long-lost Italian ancestors can be a difficult task. Reporter Silvia Marchetti finds out exactly what one Sicilian family tree researcher's work involves.

How ancestry detectives help Americans and Brits find their Italian roots

Fabio Cardile from Palermo has a very peculiar job. For 25 years he’s been working as a family tree researcher for American and European clients interested in discovering their Italian origins.

They have an Italian background and an Italian-sounding last name, but have no idea who their ancestors were and, in most cases, don’t even know from where they migrated. 

“I started doing these investigations first by dedicating myself to researching the origin of my own last name, Cardile, where exactly my family came from,” 44-year-old Cardile tells The Local.

“Then this passion turned into a job, and now I have clients from abroad contacting me and hiring me to dig into their family history and unearth information on their ancestral backgrounds.”

He was the one who discovered the origin of the last name of American actor John Travolta, and he also carried out research on the origins of Jill Biden’s Sicilian heritage. 

In all cases, these are stories of Italian immigrants who left their homes decades, if not centuries ago, to find a brighter future in the US or in Europe, including the UK, France and Germany. 

“In the hardest cases all clients are able to give me is their last name and I need to trace back in time the origin of it and the location in Italy where still nowadays there are similar-sounding names.”

READ ALSO: An expert guide to getting Italian citizenship via ancestry

What makes his job particularly tough is that most immigrants, when they landed in their country of destination, changed their surname by adapting it linguistically to the community they had moved to.

“It was very common for immigrants in the past to make their names sound American or English in order to adapt, be accepted by the local community and find a job more easily. They did not want to stand out from the crowd as Italians and be discriminated against in any way,” says Cardile.

Fabio Cardile has worked as a family tree researcher for 25 years. Photo: Fabio Cardile

Cardile’s job is very complex. He starts his investigations by digging into state records, as well local parish and graveyard archives, for ancient documents to support the ancestry claims of his foreign clients, who are pushed by a nostalgic need to reconnect with their forsaken roots.

He starts off with some online tools: four basic websites (gens.info; familysearch.org; ancestry.it; antenati.cultura.gov.it) where he can start looking for the geographic origin of last names by just typing them into a search bar – but as three of these sites are only in Italian, his foreign clients need his help.

On some of these websites, particularly the one run by the Culture Ministry, he finds state archives concerning birth certificates, death certificates, wedding certificates, or divorce certificates with specific dates and names, which allow him to start drawing up a family tree. 

READ ALSO: Five surprising things to know about applying for Italian citizenship via ancestry

“Obviously, the more information people give me on where their ancestors might have hailed from, the easier it is for me to find the location and narrow down the search,” he says. 

Cardile works across Italy, not just focusing on Sicily where most Italian emigrants left in the 1800-1900s. 

State archives go back until the 1860s, when the Italian kingdom was formed, and in some cases, all the way back to the Renaissance, he says. Initial research starts at around €300 then Cardile’s fee rises if he needs to travel around Italy for further investigation.

When he has unearthed specific information on the probable origins of a family, he makes a trip to the local parishes, churches and graveyards which in a pre-unified Italy were the only places where birth and other family-related certificates could be found. This is where he may discover the original names of ancestors, who they were, when they got married, if they had children and who these could be, so he can more precisely define the family tree. 

READ ALSO:  What a law from 1912 means for your claim for Italian citizenship via ancestry

“When you get to digging into centuries-old religious documents, the hard part about dealing with churches and parishes is you need to interface with the priest or the chief of the local parish community, jump through hoops and tons of bureaucracy to get their permission to lay your hands on, and analyse, old documents”. 

“Then, most of these documents are written in Latin, so you either need the priest as translator, or to know Latin yourself”. 

After so many years of ancestry investigations Cardile has learned to read it and continues to hone his Latin language skills.

Find out more about putting together an application for Italian citizenship via ancestry in The Local’s Italian citizenship section.

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