Italy
There is a difference, subtle yet decisive, between having a roof and having a home. Anyone who works every day alongside migrant people learns this quickly, not from textbooks but in the rooms visited for work: those rented apartments, often far too expensive for what they provide, where dampness rises from the walls like a second voice, where the bed is a shift rather than a shelter. People set down there, one might say, the way one sets down a tool needed early in the morning: ready to be picked up at dawn for labor in the fields, on construction sites, in someone else’s kitchen. Dormitory-houses, kitchens dirty from exhaustion rather than neglect, mold that returns every autumn like a fixed season on the calendar of those who have no voice to demand anything better.
It is not an aesthetic matter. It is a question of dignity, and dignity, as we know, is not a luxury granted only when everything else is covered. It is the first thing taken away when a person is treated as labor rather than as a human being with a life to dwell in. A damp, dark, uncared-for home tells its inhabitant: you do not matter enough here to deserve better. And it says so every day, silently, in the way the plaster crumbles or in the way no one ever asks whether that house makes one feel at home.
Because dwelling, genuine dwelling, is a verb that demands time and choice. One dwells in a home when one can care for it: hanging something on the wall, choosing where to place a chair, keeping it clean not out of obligation but out of affection for the space one inhabits. It is the very same gesture we all make when returning home, fluffing a cushion, watering a plant, washing a dish while already thinking of tomorrow. Small acts that declare: this place belongs to me, and I belong to it. Those who instead live in a transit room, endlessly shared with alternating shifts, have neither the time nor the space for such gestures. And so the home ceases to be a home and turns into merely a place to sleep, waiting to move on again.
This wound deepens, for those arriving from afar, with another absence: that of the homeland home. In my work as an intercultural mediator, I have listened countless times to the story of that lost home, and I have learned that the memory of a place is never neutral, nor is it ever one single memory. Some carry with them the image of a single room, simple yet filled with voices, kitchen aromas, a mother calling for lunch. Others instead—and many are the stories arriving from Africa or Asia—remember large, crowded houses inhabited by extended families with many children, where joyful commotion never ceased and doors remained open all day, within a community holding hands across those unlocked thresholds. And finally, there are those who carry memories of homes scarred by war or poverty, homes fled to survive, homes that in memory are no longer a shelter but an open wound. For all these people, in different ways, that memory becomes a silent standard against which every new dwelling is judged, and always found wanting: wanting in voices, wanting in open doors or locks, wanting in that fabric of relationships that a home, elsewhere, was able to hold.
In both cases, what is missing is the possibility of taking root, even small roots, even temporary ones. A root does not need to be eternal to be real: it only needs a little fertile ground. And fertile ground, for those who migrate, also consists of dry walls, a door that closes and protects, a space conceived for living and not merely for renting out.
That is why, when I encounter well-cared-for homes where a migrant family has succeeded, perhaps after years, in building a small world of their own—chosen curtains, photos on the refrigerator, the fragrance of a dish from their homeland blending with that of the new one—I understand that something far greater than a lease agreement has occurred. Someone has been able to begin dwelling again, in the full sense of the word: not merely staying, but living. And it is there, far better than in any speech, that one measures the dignity a community is willing to grant to those it welcomes.
Then there is an actor who too often remains in the background of this account, yet carries enormous weight: the employer. It happens, and has happened many times in my experience, that those who hire a migrant person care very little about the house in which that person lives: accommodations arranged on the cheap, often recognized as barely dignified by the employers themselves, yet deemed sufficient because intended only for the duration of the contract, for the time that person is useful. Once the need ends, so does the interest in the roof over their head. Fortunately, this is not always the case: there are employers who, on the contrary, become the first real guarantee for accessing dignified, lawful housing, putting their signature forward to support a rental contract that no one else would have granted. Yet beside these two extremes lies a more subtle and equally serious problem: fictitious housing, offered by the employer only on paper to meet the housing requirements mandated for family reunification procedures. A home that exists in legal records but not in the real life of those meant to live there: yet another form in which the dignity of dwelling is bent to bureaucratic convenience rather than upheld as a fundamental human right.
A dignified home is not a privilege to be earned through the exhaustion of underpaid labor. It is a right that precedes work, because no person should be treated as mere manpower before being treated as a human being who simply needs a place to return to and feel at home.
Photo by Massimo Buccarello
