Uneven Paths: Latin American Women Facing Italian Family Reunification Policies

The paper provides a qualitative exploration of the impact of family migration policies on Latin American migrants in Italy. As the data collected reveals, the right to family life is differently accessed and regulated along lines of nationality/ethnicity, gender and class, reflected in more or less rigidly constrained formal and informal reunification pathways, which differently affect gender, intergenerational and care relationships in the family. While Italy, compared to other European countries, still regulates the matter in a relatively generous way, the increasing restrictions, matched with widespread informality in labour and housing markets, make access to this fundamental human right highly uneven and stratified.