ABSTRACT
In March 2008, a hand-drawn image of an American Indian in full headdress appeared throughout Milan on posters emblazoned with the words: ‘they suffered immigration, now they live on reservations’. Part of the national campaign for the Lega Nord (Northern League), a party that would come to power in April as part of Berlusconi’s winning coalition, the poster was less a statement of policy than a polemical vision of an imagined future in which Italians had conceded sovereignty and were forced to live in restricted and controlled areas of their own territory. This poster operated within a national election campaign that was fought – by both major coalitions – on questions of security, migration, and European integration. This campaign continually invoked images of a country under siege from an ‘influx’ of illegitimate outsiders: ‘ clandestini’ , who circumvent border controls to enter the nation, and ‘nomads’ from new European Union member states, for whom – it was said – the border no longer existed. In the language of these campaigns, the outsiders were already inside the nation but they were also waiting at its borders.
