Italians Are Wrong to Blame Immigrants
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In southern Italy, vulgar race riots recently broke out. A day after African and Arab farm workers rioted in nearly lawless, mafia-controlled Roserno, native Italians rioted against the workers in their town. But the immigrant riot was itself provoked after years of abuse treated with impunity. For years, migrant workers have been subject to such blatant abuse that an Italian author in a book about illegal immigrants in the country noted that for many native Italian young males "hunting the black" is a popular sport. And the immigrant riot was provoked after two Italian youth shot and injured two workers.
But the authorities have now cracked down on immigrants have forced most of them out of the city. And many xenophobic Italian politicians are attacking the immigrants, claiming that they are the cause of the problems in the much poorer southern half of Italy.
But this is scapegoating. Southern Italy has genuine problems of poverty, unemployment and mafia-rule that immigrants have noting to do with. And, on the contrary, immigrant workers have actually aided southern businesses. And these immigrants suffer some of the same problems. They have to cede 5 euros of their 25 euro a day salary to the mafia. As The Economist noted:
On December 11th the Italian farmers’ confederation said that the local citrus industry had been made “unsustainable” by a flood of cheap Spanish oranges and Brazilian orange juice. Imported concentrate could be bought for €1.27 a kilo—53 cents less than production cost in Italy. The Rosarno riots were thus partly about the failure of southern Italy’s economy to cope with globalisation. They highlight the fact that much farming in the Mezzogiorno has been kept going only by dubious expedients: the widespread fiddling of European Union subsidies (curbed in recent years) and the use of an artificially (indeed, illegally) cheap labour force.
Immigrants make up an increasingly large part of the Italian population. It is wrong to scapegoat the problems of Italy's economy on them as opportunistic anti-immigrant politicians are doing. By avoiding and obscuring its real problems by pointing to immigrants, Italy only undermines itself.
Chauvinistic nationalism has never served Italy well in the past.
