This paper focuses on the impact of Covid pandemic experienced in Italy by the five hundred beneficiaries of the “Humanitarian Corridors” Program, a private sponsorship program, funded by two Catholic NGOs, Caritas Italy and the Community of Sant’Egidio. From 2018 to 2020, it allowed asylum seekers to legally enter Italy and be accompanied in a pathway towards social integration and financial autonomy by Italian volunteers and NGOs social workers, called "hosting communities".
Methodologically, the study is based on more than five hundred in-person and online interviews and focus groups, conducted from 2019 to 2022 with refugees, volunteers and NGOs social workers.
The outcomes lead to focus this study on three relevant consequences of the pandemic in an anthropological perspective.
The first one concerns social inequalities between refugees and hosting communities: refugees often lost their jobs and returned to depend totally on NGOs and volunteers for economic and material aids while the sudden economic crisis forced many Italians to ask those NGOs for economic and material aids. Interviews showed that in some cases the economic crisis produced an interesting social rapprochement between these groups of people, overcoming some political, religious and cultural differences often experienced in the field of migrants’ integration.
The second consequence concerns how Italians experienced immobility, the closure of national borders, and the curfew. The study will focus on how immobility changed the way Italians implemented their “hosting” roles: most of them described immobility as an opportunity to experience and understand some aspects of refugees’ previous lives.
Finally, the paper will underline how this immobility facilitated refugees and host communities living in rural areas or small towns. People could use open spaces to implement social activities and schooling and professional trainings. This element seems to confirm the social trend Italians had experienced throughout the pandemic crisis.
