Temporal Apartheid as the Italian Response to Global Migration

The migratory phenomenon reveals the contradictions of globalization and belies the rhetoric of open borders. Despite the economically strongest countries spending huge sums to restrict immigration, more and more migrants reach the destination countries. Many western societies (such as Italy) give discriminatory responses to this global phenomenon and place migrants in a peculiar spatio-temporal collocation that I call “temporal apartheid”. The concepts of standard time and social time are analysed up to the issues raised by postcolonial critical anthropology. In particular, it is noted how the classical anthropology built a temporal distance between researcher and natives, which is in fact a distance in terms of civilization. Following this thread, a theoretical and empirical analysis is conducted to conclude that in Italy migrants are allochronic with respect to natives, that is: migrants and natives do not exist in the same (social) time. The essay is concluded by a comparison between the Italian and French migration situation and politics.