Introduction

This chapter analyses the emerging national and local models of incorporating minorities from an international migration background in Italy. It uses Milan as a case study and focuses on second generations from an immigrant background, which are considered a new frontier in public and policy debate (Andall, 2002; Colombo and Rebughini, 2012). Italy might be considered a latecomer – even a backward case of poor relevance for an international audience that has long been debating immigrant policies and generations from an immigrant background as policy targets. However, Italy is also an interesting comparative case in the European arena. Today, Italy has one of the largest numbers of immigrant residents in Europe, and it is at the forefront of some of the most meaningful societal and institutional challenges pertaining to immigrant-related diversity. These challenges include the societal reception and incorporation of super-diversity, along with the layering of very different immigrants groups in terms of length and reason of stay, origin and migration path (including recent humanitarian flows across the Mediterranean Sea), as well as the transformation of national identities to recognise new and future citizens from immigrant backgrounds.

Since migration and incorporation do not necessarily follow a linear path, and the experience of diversity is place- and time-specific, Italy is facing the same post-Fordist, super-diverse migration and minority-building processes that other European countries are facing today. Nevertheless, these processes are taking place with specific features:

• • without a policy legacy from the management of 20th-century migration flows – and even without an explicit immigrant policy;

• • with a micro regulation that may be considered at the forefront of localising migration policy in Europe, within a trend of rescaling social and immigrant policy (Kazepov, 2010; Glick Schiller and Çağlar, 2011; Barberis and Pavolini, 2015); and

• • using an intercultural approach that – as stated in the first point – is not based on a retreat from multiculturalism.

In this respect, this chapter contextualises and stresses the consequences of this implicit intercultural incorporation model by placing it in the frame of recent neoassimilationist policy trends (Joppke and Morowska, 2003; Ambrosini and Boccagni, 2016). The hypothesis is that interculturalism in practice is not a consistent approach, since it includes different ways of framing diversity. In general, interculturalism is often presented as a consistent policy puzzle, which rejects ‘traditional’ European models of integration, whether assimilationist or multiculturalist, in favour of a ‘middle ground’.