Abstract

During the last years, some mayors have issued orders aimed at narrowing the access to legal domicile. These orders introduce further obligations than those provided by national laws in order to achieve the registration into the Municipal Registry Office: an income upper than a certain threshold; an accommodation in keeping with specific standard of healthiness; the possibility to demonstrate not to be «socially dangerous». The status of legally domiciled is highly important inasmuch it is connected to the access to some rights. For this reason, denying the possibility of register a legal domicile is the same as putting a barrier to these rights. Although the orders are illegitimate - legal domicile, indeed, is a matter of national competence, despite the fact that registration practices are attributed to the local authorities - the strategy of exclusion based on the denial of the registration may however be effective. More specifically, the mayor's orders work as mechanisms of migration control, since they try to «filter» the people who live within the territory of a town separating the «good» local citizens - the formal legally domiciled - from the «bad» local citizens - those to whom the legal domicile is denied - and try to exclude these latter from the access to social rights. Therefore, as we will show in the article, the local strategies of exclusion based on the denial of legal domicile contribute to strengthen a system of civic stratification.