Report
People under international protection are living on the streets in Bari
The union Fuorimercato has denounced the limbo that deprives people of their rights. ‘With the dismantling of the structures of the Reception and Integration System, the fate of migrants who receive international protection remains the same.’
“The direct link between first-stage and second-stage reception has been broken. Once they have been granted international protection, many migrants hosted at Bari's Reception Center for Asylum Seekers (CARA) find themselves living on the streets, without housing and food, deprived of their rights.” They are left in limbo, which, according to the Fuorimercato union office, “is useful to meet the labor demand of those productive sectors that need disposable labor” and thus have a wide pool of workers available, in a situation marked by deep uncertainty.
One factor is the first-stage reception facility, designed for a temporary stay and located inside a military base near Bari Palese airport, entirely disconnected from the fabric of the city. Then, the Territorial Commission has “very long waiting times” to hear asylum seekers and grant recognition of international protection (more than a year for a process estimated to take between three and six months, with extreme delays even in communicating the result of the interview).
“Once granted, protection effectively remains a dead letter,” Fuorimercato accuses. “With the dismantling of the structures of the Reception and Integration System, the fate of migrants who receive international protection remains the same. The right to housing, even for a limited time, is one of many that they are not granted. The paradox is that without a home, they cannot use international protection to obtain papers, that is, to get that card that allows them to access basic services such as health care or to move freely. They are put on a kind of waiting list by municipalities. In the meantime, where are they going to live and what are they going to live on? Something very serious is happening. There is a sense that these people must remain invisible, which means easily blackmailed. That's why there are no contracts, legal paychecks or medical or legal protection in the workplace for them.”
One asylum seeker formerly hosted at CARA says: “I am already living on the streets. Many others have been told to leave the center by next week. We don't know where to go. There are many in my situation, and there will be more still.” There are numerous cases of people staying in the facility for more than a year. And while it is true that those hosted there, due to stress and uncertainty about their fate, show the greatest prevalence of psychological problems, what awaits them after CARA looks just as foreboding. The very poor sanitary conditions of overcrowded containers converted into dorms aren’t all that different from those they will face on the side of a road in the suburbs – going from the feeling of social isolation and segregation from the local community to an even more tangible social marginalization.
Last week was the third time that migrants initially held in the center in Albania, in Gjader, were transferred here, in this invisible critical situation that continues to grow, after the Rome Court of Appeal's ruling not to validate their detention abroad. Once again, the migrants asked the prefecture and local institutions to remedy the situation by “approving the procedure to have access to what is provided by the respective laws.” After the scandal of the death of Bangaly Soumaoro inside the Bari center on November 4 and the complaints over the poor sanitary conditions that followed, the struggle of the “invisibles” trapped in the orbit of the Bari Cara center is continuing.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/cara-di-bari-la-denuncia-dei-migranti-abbiamo-la-protezione-internazionale-ma-viviamo-per-strada on 2025-02-05