Immigration irrégulière et métiers du soin à la personne : rhétoriques d'exclusion et pratiques de tolérance

Irregular immigration is a case in point of a form of mobility forbidden in principle and fought against by national policies and by supra-national institutions, like European Union. But irregular immigration continues to thrive. Regularization measures follow, and they appear an interesting procedure of redefinition of the rules on allowed mobility, adapting laws to social reality. In these operations of legalization of mobility a posteriori, Southern European countries, and Italy at the first place, have been at the forefront. In Italy, the sector that has produced the biggest volume of regularizations is domestic sector and domestic care work. In this context, starting from research studies conducted along ten years (2003-2012), I present an analysis of interactions established at micro-social level between the native household, acting as employer, and immigrant careworker. Here, in the private space of the home, these interactions foster acceptance, welcome, mutual knowledge, mixed with exploitation, and at the end the decision to regularize the immigrant worker: a decision which, in Italian law, only the employer has the right to take. So, the mobility in principle forbidden by the State, becomes a practice socially authorized “from the bottom”, so as to obtain its legitimization.