Expulsion from the territory

The limits of the Catholic organizations’ actions can be seen in their lack of response to the deportations that took place in Ventimiglia (and that continued to take place at the end of 2018). There were two types of deportation: 1) ‘returns’ from France to Italy, and 2) deportations (internal deportations) within the Italian territory from North to South.

Returns followed two schemes: deportation of asylum seekers under the Dublin System, and - more relevant for the present analysis - the direct returns under the bilateral Chambery Agreement (République Française & Repubblica Italians 2000), an agreement signed by Italy and France to

Christian charity as the last line of defense 263 manage migration and shared border areas. The Chambery Agreement created an ‘express’ procedure whereby migrants who were intercepted travelling from Italy to France without permits were immediately deported back to Italy. Different groups of activists, such as Roya Citoyenne or No Borders, opposed this type of semi-legal procedure, which in many cases oversteps legal boundaries as is the case of deportations of unaccompanied minors who should have been placed in the custody of the State (ASGI 2018).

Internal deportations are based on the need for the correct identification of migrants in the Eurodac database and on the ‘decompression’ of reception structures in Northern Italy. In practice, this meant that those who were apprehended when traveling to France without permits were detained, and subjected to a control to verify whether any documentation on their identity existed and whether their fingerprints had been correctly entered into the Eurodac database; if this was not the case, they were taken into police custody and sent to the hotspot of Taranto. This served as a deterrent and forced migrants to make long journeys or spend their money to return to Ventimiglia. This practice has been strongly denounced by various organizations in Italy (Quadroni & Luppi 2016).

The situation described above was the third problem encountered by migrants during their presence in Ventimiglia. Beyond the pertinence and il/ legality of this type of dynamic in the management of migrations and borders, if the issue is approached from the point of view of migrants, these practices constitute a source of uncertainty and suffering. Apprehensions and deportations were carried out all over Ventimiglia: all migrants who approached the train station, the market, the health institutions, could be stopped by the police and sent to the hotspot in Taranto if they did not present the appropriate documentation. In France, the situation was not very different. In cities as distant from the border as Nice, or even in Marseille, the police could require documentation at train and bus stations from persons considered to be in transit from Italy, and deport them back if they did not meet the administrative requirements (on the process of determining the ‘suspects’ of being in an irregular situation see Aris Escarcena 2018). Deportation became thus a ‘sword of Damocles’ for migrants in transit between Italy and France.

The (lack of) response from Catholic organisations

The Catholic organizations providing shelter and food assistance in Ventimiglia did not actively oppose deportation policies. Their limited engagement with these issues concerned mainly deportations of unaccompanied minors; actions that depended on professionalized sectors, completely detached from the local voluntary sphere of these organizations. The absence of direct intervention on the part of the Catholic organizations requires a reflection on the limitations of Catholic activism.

However, it is important to point out that apprehensions enforced for the purposes of deportation within the Italian territory did not occur in the places where Catholic organizations operated, thus, leaving some ‘safe’ places for migrants in Ventimiglia. The ‘protected areas’ were in evidence near the Delle Qianchette Church. Except for the informal camps located under the bridge and on the banks of the river, the street leading to the church saw many apprehensions, but the police never stopped the young migrants who occupied the public benches located in the square at the entrance of the church. In the same street, there was a center set up by the ‘Eufemia’ organization. It became known as the ‘Infopoint,’ where multiple services were offered to migrants, including an ability' to charge telephones, gain access to the Internet or receive legal aid. Numerous migrants came to the ‘Infopoint.’ However, unlike in the previous scenario, they were frequently detained.

The relationship between the humanitarian structures of the Catholic Church and the social policies of the State is one of the major obstacles to the political positioning of local Catholic activism. At the local level, this is expressed, on one hand, in the immunity of Catholic organizations and their volunteers from policies of repression that affected other organizations, and on the other hand, in the acceptance of migration management decisions and policies that went beyond the humanitarian threshold. This limitation of Catholic organizations to the exclusive implementation of humanitarian/car-itative projects is the main drawback of the leadership of Catholic organizations. There are two explanatory dimensions to this issue: 1) Catholic social and humanitarian assistance organizations have become bureaucratized. As T. Waters (2018) explains, this bureaucratization entails serious limitations and results in professionalization, technification, and depoliticization of humanitarian assistance; 2) charity, as a cultural value, has a limitation since it presents assistance as a disinterested concession and does not question the origins of the need for assistance. If humanitarian assistance is exercised as a depoliticized action, charity acquires a paternalistic connotation.

Catholic leadership, between ‘euergesia’ and social justice

The leadership of Catholic charity organizations established a final line of defense in situations of complete vulnerability of migrants. The ability to respond to the distress of migrants is a final safeguard when the policies of authorities (local or national) challenge deeply rooted social values. Its potential has been demonstrated by mobilizing social sectors that would otherwise hardly have been involved in activities in support of migrants. This cultural and social capital has been based on the need to defend the social values that are being put at risk. The erosion of rights and the loss of the capacity to exercise basic rights must be considered in relation to the erosion and impoverishment of the cultural systems, in which they are sustained. Resistance to this situation of violation is based on the defense of shared values, which is one of the most basic forms of identification and social belonging.

However, the issue remains the same as formulated by Muehlebach (2013: 462): ‘how we differentiate between paternalistic charity and justice, and how we make charity morph into radical solidarity.’ While the leadership of Catholic organizations is an enormous boost in the creation of a last line of defense for migrants, the dynamics of their activism strengthen a limited interpretation of social values, an interpretation that has not allowed us to imagine new forms of social articulation around them. In the analysis of the reconfiguration of values today, it seems useful to reintroduce the concept of ‘euergetism’ in the sense used by A. Boulanger and his followers, especially B. Dumézil (2005). Here the value of charity is understood as a paternalistic activity exercised as a moral gesture offered from a position of superiority. In this sense, it is opposed to charity understood as a basis for justice. ‘Euergesia’ would be a social behavior motivated by the same moral principle but opposed in its development into (social) justice. From this point of view, there are two fundamental factors that determine the preponderance of the energetic sense in the development of humanitarian assistance: 1) the victimization and inferiorization of the subject of assistance, 2) the dislocation between the benefactor and the assisted, and the potential inversion of the sense of the distributive relationship. The depoliticization of projects to assist migrants can lead to the emergence of both factors and, therefore, condition the way in which the assistance action is understood.

Marcel Mauss points out in the ‘Moral Conclusions’ of ‘The Gift’ (1966: 63) the need to think of social assistance not as charity but as a social debt contracted as a group with the people who are part of it; and in another fragment (pp. 15-16) he shows the original semantic union of the word charity with justice. There exists today the political need to imagine how to connect the great social agreement existing around the principle of humanity that upholds values such as charity (understood as justice and not as paternalism) with political inclusion projects in the sense presented almost a century ago by Mauss.