L'immigrato, l'italiano e il burocratese

This chapter deals with difficulties and complexity in written institutional communication. Particularly, it focuses on the obstacles that immigrants encounter in decoding institutional texts from the initial stages of integration into the host country. The right to citizenship, the right to health, to work, are achievable only if the input offered to foreign nationals is proportional to the skills needed to decode texts, especially bureaucratic ones, which are often obscure, even for native speakers. In this regard, we examine some texts directed to immigrants, to assess the readability, the effectiveness according to the skills acquired and required, to review what is expected of immigrants and how the immigration policies of Italy manage to implement to ensure the active and conscious participation of foreign nationals in public domains: work, school, health, housing, etc.