ABSTRACT
What happens when a regime of rights is substituted by a regime of deservingness? What do Italian institutions expect from migrants and vice versa? How do social workers mediate these possibly conflicting expectations? Though it descends from a strong rights-based approach, the asylum system claims to uphold a meritocracy, follows the staircase model, and embodies the logic of a declining welfare, with its moral economy of what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad.’ Drawing on fieldwork conducted between October 2013 (with the beginning of the Mare Nostrum operation) and May 2019, this chapter uses the concepts of deservingness and the community of value to analyze the social construction of the un/worthy refugee and aims to interrogate the policies meant to govern irregular migrants and asylum seekers, as well as the constructions of Italy’s ‘real refugees’ and ‘good citizens.’
