Anxiety, Ambivalence, and the Violence of Expectations: Migrant Reception and Resettlement in Sicily

ABSTRACT Throughout Europe, the arrival of irregular migrants in recent years has triggered the expression of nativist anxieties, witnessing a broad recourse to violent rhetoric and the embrace of exclusivist models of national and regional community. With an ethnographic focus on migrant resettlement in Sicily, this paper argues that the elaboration of a cosmopolitan ethic that rejects the politics of exclusion can be met with ambivalence by local people who share neither the middle-class sensibilities of refugee advocates, nor their access to the public funds by which it is possible to earn income as social service and resettlement workers. Consequently, migrant advocacy is dogged by the widespread presumption that its aims are not necessarily altruistic, and that the apparatus of migrant resettlement is staffed by actors best positioned to take advantage of the lucrative opportunities presented by the migrant crisis. At the same time, newcomers’ incorporation into the body politic as a reserve army of labour, and the expectation imposed upon them to adapt to host communities and contribute productively to the local economy in any way they can, represents a key element of migrant marginalisation that even their own advocates do not explicitly question. Finally, this marginalisation is further exacerbated by contemporary populist rhetoric that positions newcomers as an existential threat to the society.