ABSTRACT
Having in mind the classical example of the history of European Jews, Georg Simmel wrote the well-known essay “The Stranger”. As he explains, the stranger is neither the “outsider” who has no specific relation to a group nor the “wanderer” who comes today and leaves tomorrow. Considered as a unique sociological category, the stranger settles in a spatial group but “his position in the group is determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself” (Simmel, 1950: 402). It is not difficult to identify similarities between Simmel’s stranger and the immigrant in contemporary societies, particularly in the West. The immigrant is, in fact, fixed within a society – Simmel talks about a particular spatial group – and he holds features of nearness and remoteness as in any human relationship. But with the immigrant, as with the stranger, distance means that the immigrant, who is close by, is far, and at same time he who also is far, is actually near (Simmel, 1950). Moreover, the immigrant accumulates all those dimensions of otherness: the racial, the ethnic, the religious, and the low social class.
