Policies of eviction: making visible the EU border in Sicily’s rural areas

Across Italy, seasonal workers and others with migratory backgrounds live in informal settlements in rural areas. These settlements offer forms of autonomy and community alongside hardships. Italian and EU authorities frame settlements as “undignified” and mobilise humanitarian reasoning to justify police evictions in the name of creating “legal” hostels. Yet four years of fieldwork in Sicily show that these measures dismantle homes and networks, worsen living conditions, and fail to provide viable alternatives, leading to detention and deportations. These interventions produce a border spectacle that secures a more deportable, vulnerable labour force while pushing people into further forms of invisibility. By showing how and to what effect bordering occurs in rural areas, themselves often considered “invisible” – including in scholarship – this article contributes to theorising the internalisation of the EU Border. It demonstrates how “marginal” areas are particular enclaves where governance takes the shape of bordering through humanitarian and police actions.