Anna Galdo from Caritas Roma and Michelle Hough from Caritas Internationalis General Secretariat in Senegal.
The two worlds of migration
By Michelle Hough, Caritas communications officer
I’ve just been to Senegal, I live in Rome and I come from England. And today I’m in Casablanca, where I’ve stopped off for a couple of days on my way back from Caritas’s Female Face of Migration conference in Senegal.
Zara, a Moroccan woman I know in Rome, is actually from Casablanca. However, she’s not been able to come here – to her home – for five years. She’d been studying and working hard for a family in Rome. The money she was earning wasn’t enough to go back home with her children for a holiday.
When I saw Zara last summer she was about to lose her job. This would put at risk her ability to stay in Italy. Without a job, she would eventually lose her permit to stay. That would mean living undocumented and in fear of being caught by the police. If she ever tried to go back home to Casablanca, once she got beyond Italy’s borders, she wouldn’t be let back in. But she wouldn’t go back by choice, as she had built a life in Italy.
Zara’s children have been raised in Italy, they speak Italian and not Arabic, they go to Italian schools, and yet they are not allowed Italian citizenship. They will have the pain of living in a country and yet never really belonging there. And yet, if their mother does lose her right to stay in Italy and they are deported back to Morocco, the children won’t belong there either. Continue reading
