Seconde generazioni, interazione interculturale e diritto. Percorsi d’indagine tra difficoltà e opportunità delle appartenenze “multiple”

The main purpose of this essay is to analyze the experience of the second generation of migrants to Italy from an intercultural perspective. By capturing their life plots within the wider framework of migration, the enquiry focuses on the opportunities, difficulties and significancies held within the stories they live. Both the survey and the text reflect an ethnographic approach.
A qualitative investigation carried out in Parma provides interview excerpts from a sample of “children of immigration” (mainly from North-Africa). Relying upon these interviews, the essay addresses personal identity, familial relationships, religious belonging, and the younger generations’ views of the future.
Through the spectrum of these narratives, this work attempts to assess the meaning and impact of cultural difference on the quotidian life of migrants. More specifically, the inquiry examines the role that legal professionals can play in providing intercultural support to second generation migrants within their host societies and across the related legal structures. From this analysis some questions and operational hypotheses arise: could both the “children of immigration” and the legal practitioners with whom they interact learn to reciprocally communicate and translate their own exigencies by means of co-construed narratives? Could such efforts promote a use of “rules” and legal apparatuses that is efficacious and conducive to a real respect for cultural differences through a neutralization of ethnocentric prejudices and categorizations?
The essay gives a positive answer to such questions and indicates a developmental path in this direction, particularly as regards the activities of operators in the field of social welfare.