by Gül Ince Beqo
Caption photo: My last day of university which represents the complicated transition from study to employment.
My fieldwork with irregular migrant women applying for Italy’s 2020 sanatoria[1] unfolded in ways I could not have anticipated. What I initially expected to study as a straightforward administrative process quickly revealed itself to be a deeply uneven terrain, one that echoed parts of my own journey through Italy’s migration policy. Listening to the women’s stories meant looking beyond policies and procedures. It meant hearing about the fear, love, obligation, and uncertainty that shaped their choices, and seeing how much their lives depended on the unpredictable decisions of others.
Research never begins in the field; it begins in the life of the researcher
Although my fieldwork took place within the structured research project of FAiR, my engagement with the topic was inevitably shaped by my own long, intimate negotiation with Italy’s migration bureaucracy. This history influenced how I entered the field, how I related to participants, and how I understood the emotional and relational landscapes that emerged during our encounters.
Performing my own “worthiness”
I first came to Italy in 2007-2008 for an Erasmus exchange. When the program ended, I knew I wanted to stay. Yet with limited Italian and few job prospects, the only viable option was to return through a student visa. At that time in Turkey, the visa process was starkly direct: there were no intermediaries, no agencies to buffer or advise. Applicants faced the consulate alone, presenting themselves, their plans, and their intentions without institutional mediation.
For me, this meant standing beside my boyfriend, trying to demonstrate not only my academic purpose but also the strength of our relationship, how we loved each other and hoped to build a life together in Italy. Securing a student visa depended entirely on persuading the officer that I embodied what the migration regime considered “appropriate” mobility. It was an early lesson in performing worthiness before someone who had the power to approve or derail a life trajectory.
When the visa was granted, it allowed me three additional years within the protective boundaries of the university. I remember how reluctant I was to take my final exam, not out of academic hesitation, but because graduation marked the end of that shelter. Beyond it lay a bureaucratic uncertainty that felt far more daunting than any thesis defense. During this fragile transition, I relied heavily on personal relationships. My boyfriend, now my husband, and I often encountered people who held strong anti-immigrant opinions in the abstract, yet were unexpectedly willing to help us because, as they put it, “we were not like the others.” It was an early, intimate encounter with the logics of deservingness.
Mirroring Experiences
As I spoke with women navigating the sanatoria process, I began to notice how their trajectories depended on the willingness of others (employers, friends, acquaintances) to take the steps that could move their applications forward. Waiting for someone’s decision, hoping for support, and feeling exposed all felt unexpectedly familiar.
But the women’s circumstances were far more precarious. Regularization could be delayed, jeopardized, or entirely lost depending on someone else’s willingness to act. Employers held the legal authority to initiate the sanatoria application, yet they could also abandon it halfway, postpone paperwork indefinitely, or disappear altogether. For many participants, the path to legal status was not a straightforward administrative procedure but a fragile relationship shaped by uneven power, personal goodwill, and sometimes sheer luck.
This fragility extended beyond employers. Whether women managed to regularize often depended on the city where they lived, whether it had active civil society organisations, legal clinics, or migrant associations, or whether such resources were absent. It depended on whether family members offered support or created tension, whether friends could accompany them to appointments, help with forms, or provide a place to stay. These variables were not peripheral to the migration process; they were the process itself.
In our conversations, these parallels created a quiet sense of mutual understanding. Their experiences helped me see the broader structures I had once moved through, while my own stories helped them see their struggles not as personal failures but as the predictable results of a system built on uneven support. Together, we recognized that even though our situations differed in scale and consequence, we both lived in worlds where borders were shaped by relationships and by the uncertain availability of help.
Entangled Lives
My fieldwork made it impossible to view regularization as a set of individual journeys; instead, these processes emerged as webs of relationships, obligations, silences, and ongoing negotiations. Migrant women were not simply navigating institutions; they were navigating the people who stood between them and those institutions.
Listening to their narratives, I came to understand regularity as the fragile outcome of countless social interactions. An employer decides; sometimes out of fairness, sometimes out of fatigue, sometimes out of a fleeting sense of responsibility; to initiate a sanatoria application. Yet that same employer may later lose interest.
And then there were the entanglements that stretched across continents. Women spoke of children left behind, parents counting on them, partners waiting. Love and responsibility threaded through every decision. Some described how a partner’s encouragement emboldened them; others how the ache of separation weighed on their choices. Obligations, toward siblings, toward entire households, moved with them, quietly but insistently, through every bureaucratic corridor.
Listening to them, I felt familiar echoes. I, too, had understood how personal networks could protect or expose, how the discretion of consulates, employers, and even acquaintances could open a door or gently close it. Their stories illuminated my own past in ways I had not expected.
Recognizing these entanglements does not solve them, but it clarifies what migrant women already understand in their bones: migration is lived through relationships. It is shaped by the meanings people attach to movement, sustained by care, complicated by uneven support, and influenced by decisions made far beyond one’s control. Their stories unfolded in these layered and fragile spaces. And it was within these same spaces that I learned to read both their trajectories and my own, more slowly, more humbly, and with a deeper awareness of how profoundly we depend on one another.
[1] Sanatoria is an employment-related regularization process where people living in Italy without legal permission can apply to become regular, meaning they can work and live more safely.