Sandro Rinauro, Social Research on Italian Emigration During the Reconstruction Years

During the Reconstruction years, the Italian Government considered mass migration as the most effective tool to prevent social conflict and to favor economic restructuring. At the same time, Italian emigration underwent one of its most difficult periods because of the restrictive immigration policies adopted by many nations. The public opinion surveys carried out by Doxa in those years show the painful contrast between the limited number of workers welcomed abroad and the enormous number of candidates for expatriation; the propensity to emigration by region and by socio-demographic groups; the lasting importance of the “chain migration”; the declining propensity to emigrate because of the lack of assistance by the Italian State and the mishaps encountered abroad; the sharp contrast between the desired destination of most people – the US above all – and the actual one.

Federica Bertagna, Matteo Sanfilippo, Per una prospettiva comparata dell’emigrazione nazifascista dopo la seconda guerra mondiale

The significance of research on the nazi-fascist exodus is manifold. First of all, it may put a restraint on the excess of imagination found in literary and cinematographic production narrating the escape and revenge against followers of Hitler and Mussolini. Secondly, it may help finding better explanations on the dynamics of political migration, given the fact that growing importance is being given to non-economic factors and it would be helpful to verify to what extent and how they have been activated in the post war period. Furthermore, it is accepted that (differently from what happens more recently), past flows involved the loser actors of any war. From this point of view, it would be peculiar that fascists, Nazis and collaborationists would not have to pay the price of defeat by leaving their respective motherland. As far as Italy is concerned, this hypothesis is indeed being reinforced by a significant number of interviews showing that the post war climate has had a strong impact on the decision to migrate of many repentant or unrepentant fascists. However, Italian historiography is silent on the matter. A larger corpus of literature is available in Germany, yet there is less propensity to consider Nazis as common migrants. Furthermore, there is no attempt to compare the experiences of different national groups (such as Italians and Germans), or either the developing experiences of exilées holding the same nationality in a given period of time. For example, there is no comparative study on the anti-fascist flows during the dictatorship, and fascist departures soon after it. Also, there is a lack of any comprehensive overview of political flights after 1945. We can argue that the trajectories of fascist and antifascist exilées were divergent, yet this is an assumption based on presumptive evidence and a number of testimonies indicating Europe as the destination for the leftists, and the New World chosen by the rightists. This essay aims at establishing a platform for discussion concerning these various issues.

Maria do Rosário Rolfsen Salles, Panorama da imigração para São Paulo no pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial: os “deslocados de guerra”

This article proposes to analyze the results of a research conducted in the São Paulo Immigrants Memorial, whose purpose was to work with an agreement between the state of São Paulo and the Union, according to which the state committed itself to receive, from May 1947 to 1952, immigrants of different European nationalities. Such immigrants had a specific characteristic that conferred them a peculiar status in the eyes of the United Nations, given the fact that they originated from Germany and Austria and where either displaced persons or refugees who could not or did not want to return to their homelands, for several reasons. Italians represented only 0,12% of this group. Italian immigration to Brazil became significant only after 1950, due to the Brazil-Italy immigration agreements.

Marina Maccari Clayton, “Communists of the Stomach”: Italian Migration and International Relations in the Cold War Era

This article discusses the development of Italian migration in the first decade after the Second World War. It argues that the heightening of the Cold War tensions in the late 1940s-early 1950s and the establishment of NATO in 1949 produced a shift in the perception of some receiving countries toward the Italian overpopulation problem. The circumstances of the Cold War era, indeed, transformed the issue of migration from a purely economic and national concern to a predominantly political and international one. In the first part, the article explores the case of Italian migration to Belgium as illustrative of the emergence of an intensive intra-European migration system, partly the result of restrictive migration policies and deteriorating economic conditions in traditional overseas destinations such as the United States, Brazil, and Argentina. The second part focuses on the activities of the NATO Working Group on Labour Mobility and the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration as key-initiatives in the attempt to create a broader international migration regime. The ambivalent position of the United States toward international initiatives in the field of migration explains their restrictive character.

Marco Guerrera, Étude comparée de l’action politique au sein des communautés italiennes au Québec et en Suisse de 1945 jusqu’au milieu des années 1960

The study of the political evolution of Italians in Quebec and Switzerland between 1945 and 1960 rests on a micro-comparative approach inspired by the works of Reinhard Bendix, Marc Bloch, Marcel Détienne and Barrington Moore Jr. Micro-comparison is based on direct analysis of two cases. It highlights new questions that have been overlooked by national history. It seeks to better understand each particular situation instead of elaborating general conclusions, theoretical models or typo- logies. Therefore, micro-comparison satisfies the methodological conditions on which history is based: respect for sources, historicism and inductive investigation. Although they are born out of the same migratory wave, the Italians in Quebec and Switzerland have experience a somewhat different political evolution. Micro-comparison shows that the interaction of factors connected to Italy (i.e., the political heritage), to the host society (i.e., the political system) and to the migrant community (i.e., demographic transformations) shapes the political life of the two communities. Nonetheless, the present study shows that the host society's reaction to immigration is pivotal to understanding the political evolution of Italians in Montreal and Switzerland. For example, in Quebec, institutional discrimination and an hostile public opinion do not prevent Italians from obtaining socio-economic mobility nor do they impede their political participation. On the other hand, in Switzerland, a closed political system and an almost total absence of integration lead to massive returns. These elements were decisive in pushing the Federazione delle Colonie Libere Italiane in Svizzera (FCLIS) to act on the Italian political scene.

Antonio Paganoni, Taking the Pulse of the Australian Catholic Church in the 1940s and 1950s

The article attempts to delineate, with broad strokes, the contours of the Catholic Church in Australia in the 1940s and in the 1950s. During these two decades, till the early 1960s, three hundred thousand Italian migrants found their way to Australia. Eventually some of them would return to Italy. They were all Catholics, but their particular brand of Catholic traditions and customs would come face to face with an Irish-dominated and fairly well-entrenched Catholicism. The article dwells only on the pulse of the Catholic Church at the time and does not take into consideration the various stages of mutual adjustment between the Italian migrants and the existing organizational and administrative aspects of the Catholic Church. It analyses the level of national cohesion and homogeneity of the Catholic Church in the vast Australian continent, some of its national attributes and essential features as must have noticed by the Italian newcomers. Both Irish and Italian Catholics professed the same adherence to the Catholic Church, but their cultural expressions differed considerably.

Maximiliane Rieder, Migrazione ed economia. L’immigrazione italiana verso la Germania occidentale dopo la seconda guerra mondiale

This article offers a retrospective of the immigration process of Italians to West Germany between the end of World War II and 1973, the year, in which the Italian population in West Germany reached its highest number. Italy had taken up the initiative to reach an agreement for the recruitment of Italian workers in Germany in view of reaching the balance of payments through remittances. The first agreement with the Adenauer administration in 1955 provided the possibility for organized mass recruitment, while giving the Italian government state control over emigration. Italians were the first and – up until 1970 – the largest group of guest workers (“Gastarbeiter”) in the Federal Republic of Germany. As citizens of a country member to the European Economic Community, the Italians were in a privileged position compared to other foreigner workers. The majority of the Italian emigrants analyzed in this study were male, came without family and mainly settled in Baden-Württemberg, North Rhine-Westphalia and Bavaria. The new Italian immigration wave of the 1990s has modified the professional and social structure of the Italian community in Germany.

Paolo Borruso, Missioni cattoliche ed emigrazione italiana in Francia nel secondo dopoguerra (1946-53)

This essay tells about the Catholic missions for Italian emigrants in France in the years of the second post-war. On the basis of the documentation of the Archives of Costantino Babini, director of the missionaries for migrants in Europe from 1928 to 1948, the article examines the development of the migratory issue in the activities of the Holy See and of the missionaries. Emigration from southern Italy heavily suffered from the consequences of the world war, while it was exposed to the increasing secularization of the French society. Babini committed himself to establishing contacts with the more renown representatives of the French theological renewal, in order to launch a “popular” Catholicism through the religious practices typical of the countries of origin, and to strengthen the fight against the fall of the religious feeling. The missionary work among the Italian emigrants in France revealed a precious contribution to the reconstruction of a moral and political national identity, while highlighting the role of the Church as a crucial agent for a new social world order.

Bruno Bonomo, Il dibattito storiografico sulle migrazioni interne italiane del secondo dopoguerra

In the period following WW2, massive internal migration movements in Italy gave rise to a major mix-up of the population within the national borders. This phenomenon, highly articulated and differentiated in the various areas, has greatly contributed to the modernisation process of the country, thereby facilitating social, cultural and linguistic integration. A sizeable corpus of scholarly research has been developed on the topic, especially in demographic and sociological studies; literature and cinema also expressed a variegated production. However, the historical overviews, notwithstanding a few relevant works, are instead still limited and partial. There is a need for specific research on the different streams and typologies of internal migration, as well as more comprehensive studies on the matter.