The research for this project was intended to analyze the Humanitarian Corridors program run by Caritas Italiana, from 2017 to 2022, as an innovative tool for ensuring a select group of beneficiaries coming from refugee camps in Ethiopia both safe and legal entry into Italy and a pathway to integration there.
Caritas Italiana, together with the Community of Sant’Egidio, was a party to a protocol agreement with the Italian government, implemented between 2017 and 2020, to bring 498 asylum seekers from Eritrea, South Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen to Italy from Ethiopia. The beneficiaries were selected on the basis of personal and familial vulnerabilities of various kinds and were flown to Italy at the expense of Caritas Italiana and the Community of Sant’Egidio. Upon landing they were hosted by 45 diocesan branches of Caritas and 12 Sant’Egidio communities located throughout Italy.
My research focused on the people taken in by Caritas Italiana, 324 of the total 498.
During the first year of the project, from April 2018 to June 2019, I visited each of the diocesan branches of Caritas involved in the program and interviewed all the various kinds of actors involved: refugees, bishops, Caritas leadership and social workers, mentor families, volunteers, and, in some cases, local mayors and schoolteachers. In all I interviewed 150 volunteers, 25 mentor families, 60 Caritas social workers, and 121 adult refugees (both single and in couples), in more than 350 partly structured interviews and 50 focus groups. The number of Caritas social workers I interviewed in the various dioceses varied according to the operating structure of the diocesan team. In some branches, the Humanitarian Corridors project was managed by a single Caritas social worker, while two or more social workers shared leadership responsibilities in others.
The number of volunteers I interviewed depended on two factors: Caritas social workers’ selection of the volunteers most directly involved in the branch’s hospitality project and the volunteers’ own availability. For my interviews with mentor families, Caritas chose at least one member of each family to be interviewed.
In nine cases, local pastors and parishes were directly involved in hosting refugee families. In three dioceses, monasteries or religious communities were involved.
The Caritas social workers, volunteers, and tutors were interviewed separately from one another, in Caritas office space. Most of the refugees were interviewed in their homes, without Caritas social workers, volunteers, or mentor families present, in order to create the most peaceful and discrete setting possible. In a small fraction of dioceses, I interviewed refugees in Caritas office space, in the presence of linguistic interpreters only.
The interviews were conducted mostly in Italian, with the assistance of a mediator. A few were conducted in English at the refugees’ request. Afterward the interviews were transcribed verbatim, and the interviewees’ identities were removed in order to render them anonymous in accordance with the ethical standards of the university. They were codified using Dedoose software. The quotes reproduced here are anonymous to protect the privacy of the interviewees.
Each interview lasted between 30 and 90 minutes.
After these in-person visits, I maintained contact via telephone and social media. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, interviews were carried out online during in 2020 and 2021.
