Goldfishes with a conscience divided into compartments

In 1974 Italy changed from being a country of emigrants to a country of immigrants. Thirty years on, immigrants are playing an ever more important role in the country. Facing the consequences of migratory phenomenon, the author seeks to show the relevance of an overall view that doesn’t lose the concreteness of specific references. In the essay I try to analyze the new items that were introduced by the «pacchetto sicurezza», where the question of immigrants stops being a collection of laws regarding migration and starts being a question of public security. Instead, the case study of Roma communities allows us to grasp the limits of the multicultural model and the drift of the process of ethnogenesis. Moreover, the author tries to illustrate the increasing role of the mass media, which is no longer a dependent variable but a co-builder of social reality, from such an analysis, no social science can escape. Finally, the consequences for “those who arrive in Italy” and for “those already in Italy” are understood from the perspective of the anthropology of violence: from the famous thesis by Hannah Arendt, to Pierre Bourdieu’s petit malaise and Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s continuum genocide.