Abstract

The Italian welcome system for asylum seekers and refugees is rather inadequate and inside it we can find many forms of prejudice, both on the side of institutions, public and private organizations, voluntary associations, and on the side of refugees. This situation, that I knew through my ethnographic fieldwork from 2007 to 2011, is able to create additional pain for asylum seekers and refugees and damage the efficacy and efficiency of the system, making worse the social and institutional operators job. In this undersized and confused welcome system, considering the multitude of public and private projects, it is possible to find out strong labelling processes to which the asylum seeker has to passively and necessarily adapt, or to be left without supports. Asylum seekers and refugees try to face these situations, using - in some case - very articulated strategies, but with the real risk to fall down in other suffering situations and to increase the welcome system's costs. Moreover, these strategies are often not able to bring to better situations, because they are based on false beliefs and erroneous assumptions. In particular, I will focus on two situations: the training, that asylum seekers receive from the social operators, to the interview at the Commission for the evaluation of the asylum claim; and some practices of resistance run by refugees, like i.e. the squatting of abandoned buildings.