The other border battlefield

While the most obvious targets of anti-immigration mobilizations in the global north are migrants themselves, this article examines a less visible conflict inherent to such mobilizations, not structured along the ethnic divide of “us” vs. “them.” Focusing on the Italian border town of Ventimiglia—an emblematic space of the EU’s “refugee crisis”—it analyzes the resentment, suspicion, and anger among residents of a white working-class neighborhood toward the local “welcome culture”—volunteers, activists, liberal church groups, and NGO professionals supporting migrants in transit. This resentment, it argues, must be read in relation to autochthonous workers’ experiences of devaluation, dispossession, and disorganization in the absence of a language of class, offering critical questions and filling a gap in ethnographic research on the social bases of neo-nationalist movements

Anger · Battlefield · Ethnic group · Ethnography · Relation (database) · Space (punctuation) · Cross-Border Cooperation and Integration · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Migration, Refugees, and Integration