Stop scapegoating Roma!

Submitted by cathy n on 25 August, 2008 - 7:16 Author: Cath Fletcher

Four months after a decisive election victory, Italy’s right-wing government has pushed through a series of racist anti-immigrant measures.

The decision to fingerprint Roma people has attracted the greatest international condemnation, but the law-and-order crackdown goes much further. Illegal immigration is now punishable by up to four years in jail, and army patrols have been deployed on city streets.

For many years Italy was a country from which people emigrated. Unlike, say, the UK or France it did not experience a substantial immigration in the second half of the twentieth century. Only now — with the lowest birth rate in Europe and serious labour shortages in some sectors — has Italy become an importer of workers. This year 170,000 migrants will be granted permits to enter Italy legally; over 740,000 have already applied. But with that change have come serious social tensions.

Italy’s two right-wing parties have long competed on racist rhetoric — a few years ago Northern League leader Umberto Bossi notoriously called on the coastguard to shoot at boats suspected of carrying illegal immigrants. This year’s election campaign was no exception. The new mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno of the supposedly post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale, won on a promise to expel 20,000 ‘illegal immigrants’ from the city. The politicians’ focus on foreign criminality helps keep the real issues — soaring prices, low wages and government austerity — off the agenda.

In July 2008 the Berlusconi government legislated for a new “security package”. As well as the new penalty for illegal immigration, any illegal immigrant convicted of crime will face penalties one-third greater than someone with the correct papers, a policy playing on public fear of crime and particularly ‘foreign’ crime. Landlords who rent to illegal immigrants face penalties of up to three years in jail, plus confiscation of the property, making it even harder for migrant workers to find suitable housing.

Yet while the right has been more openly vicious, it was the previous, centre-left government, under Romano Prodi, that enacted the first anti-immigrant measures of the current crackdown. In the wake of public anger following the arrest of a Romanian man for a particularly vicious sexual assault and murder last November, the Prodi government decreed that immigrants deemed to be a threat to public order could be summarily deported. Other centre-left politicians, like former trade union leader and mayor of Bologna Sergio Cofferati, have sent in bulldozers to evict Roma camps. The former mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni, now leader of the opposition Democratic Party, claimed that Romanians were to blame for 75% of murders, rapes and robberies in Rome last year.

The equation of foreigners and criminals is a commonplace in Italian politics. More than one-third of prisoners in Italian jails are foreign: not because foreigners commit more crime, but because the police target them, and probably because they are less able to get bail and legal representation than the average Italian. The accusations of criminality levelled against Romanians, and particularly against the Roma, who form a substantial proportion of the Romanian community in Italy, have fuelled violent attacks on Roma, most recently in Naples after the accusation that a young Roma woman had tried to kidnap a baby. The Berlusconi government’s decision to fingerprint all Roma people — beginning with those living around Naples — simply confirms the widespread belief that foreigners are peculiarly to blame for crime.

Of the eight million Roma in Europe, only about two per cent (160,000) live in Italy. Half of them are naturalised; the vast majority, as EU citizens are in any case entitled to live there. For the most part they exist in miserable conditions – sometimes literally camping, sometimes in shanty towns, mobile homes or overcrowded accommodation on the fringes of cities like Rome, Bologna and Milan. Few have proper access to the education and health care systems, and they live on poverty pay. A Roma worker in the construction sector, for example, might earn 800 euros (£630) a month working 10 hour days. Although most Roma have the right to live in Italy, that doesn’t stop them facing regular police harassment. The double-standards that operate in local immigration offices are well-known. It is not unusual to see open racism.

Yet by comparison to immigrants from outside the EU, the Roma at least have some formal protection. Far more precarious is the situation of the thousands of migrants who every year try to reach Italy in crowded fishing boats from the Libyan and Tunisian coasts. Many are refugees from Somalia and Eritrea. In the first six months of this year, 11,000 people have arrived on the tiny island of Lampedusa. Three hundred and eighty are known to have drowned trying to get there in the same period.

After its bruising defeat in the elections, Italy’s left is still in a process of regroupment. One of its priorities must be to tackle the vicious anti-immigrant policies of the main parties. That will not be an easy task, but the government’s “foreign crime wave” has to be exposed for the myth that it is, and Italian workers — suffering from soaring inflation and falling standards of living — have to be convinced that foreigners are not their enemies.

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