Italy’s citizenship law back in focus as multicultural stars triumph at Tokyo Olympics

2021/08/12 Leave a comment

Of note. Will see extent to which if influences the policy debates:

Italy’s enthusiasm over its Olympics success, driven in part by multicultural athletes, has once again reignited debate over its citizenship law and the bureaucratic hurdles faced by thousands of young people.

The debate comes on the heels of Italy’s best performance in history at the Olympic Games, with 40 gold medals from a diverse band of athletes from a variety of backgrounds, including the country’s new star, Texas-born sprinter Lamont Marcell Jacobs.

The debate was sparked anew after the head of Italy’s National Olympic Committee, Giovanni Malago, complained of the bureaucratic headaches confronting Italian-born athletes who want to compete for their country but lack citizenship.

Under its current path to citizenship, Italy is an outlier in Europe, providing rights based on blood ties rather than based on where children are born – an idea known as “ius soli”, or “right of the soil”.

Children born in Italy to foreign parents must await their 18th birthdays before applying for citizenship, beginning an arduous process that can take four years, one that Malago described as “a Dante-esque circle”.

After Interior Minister Luciana Lamorgese said Malago’s criticism was valid, far-right leader Matteo Salvini, head of the populist Lega party, retorted that the minister would be better served controlling the countries’ borders than rekindling “ius soli”.

In Italy, the far-right has linked the debate over citizenship with the ongoing migrant crisis, which this year has seen 31,777 migrants land on the country’s coasts, more than double that in the same period in 2020, according to interior ministry figures.

“I think the important thing is that for these kids we have to think of social inclusion,” Lamorgese told La Stampa daily on Tuesday, noting that the issue went beyond Italy’s young athletes.

“They have to feel an integral part of society,” she said.

‘Full-fledged Italian’

There are various paths to citizenship in Italy — Jacobs’ citizenship was accorded through his Italian mother despite being born in the United States to an American father — but that involving children of two foreign-born parents is the most complicated.

Case in point is 17-year-old pole vaulter Great Nnachi, who was born in Turin to Nigerian parents, and is already a champion. Having broken records throughout her teens, she most recently won a junior title with her personal best of 4,01 metres in February.

But her records are not recognised by the state, as she is not technically Italian, and she cannot compete for Italy in international competitions.

“Despite being a full-fledged Italian, I can’t represent my country in sports,” Nnachi told La Stampa Tuesday. “I’m an Italian champion but I can’t demonstrate it outside the border.”

Italy’s national statistics agency Istat calculates there are about 800,000 minors in Italy who would receive Italian nationality were “ius soli” adopted, while some 60,000 newborns a year would become automatically Italian.

According to Italy’s Olympic Committee, 46 of its athletes who competed in the Tokyo Olympics this year were foreign-born.

Source: Italy’s citizenship law back in focus as multicultural stars triumph at Tokyo Olympics

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Foreign-born doctors reignite Italy’s citizenship debate

2020/12/15 Leave a comment

Of note:

When the Italian government labeled Sicily a high-risk region last month over fears that the island’s limited resources would hamper its response to the second wave of the pandemic, Rumon Siddique got ready to help.

The region, one of Italy’s poorest, is struggling with a lack of doctors and nurses — and Siddique, a 29-year-old junior doctor born in Bangladesh and trained in Italy, has the necessary skills to step in. But because he doesn’t hold Italian citizenship, he’s unable to apply for open positions.

He was puzzled to learn that Sicilian authorities had instead asked the government of Cuba to deploy 60 health care workers.

“The paradox is that we already have doctors here, without having to ask Cuba,” said Siddique, who works at the Paolo Giaccone University Hospital in the Sicilian capital Palermo. “There are many foreign doctors already living in Italy, willing to fill that void. But because they don’t have Italian citizenship, they are often forgotten.”

At the height of the first wave of the pandemic, medical personnel from abroad, including teams from Cuba, Romania and Norway, were deployed in the hardest-hit northern regions of Italy. During the second wave, several regions have asked NGO workers, junior doctors — who have yet to complete their training — and retirees to prepare themselves to help out if needed.

In March, the government issued the so-called “Cure Italy” decree, which allowed hospitals and regional authorities to hire non-EU staff with legal permission to live and work in the country.

But many institutions have continued their decades-long practice of requiring either Italian or EU citizenship in their job openings, excluding foreigners trained and educated in Italy, even as the country’s intensive care units began filling up again this fall.

That has triggered a discussion on labor rights, with several immigrants’ organizations calling on the government to ensure the law is followed.

But beyond that, with first- and second-generation immigrants finding citizenship a core obstacle to employment, foreign doctors have reignited a longstanding debate on who gets to have an Italian passport — and the rights it bestows.

Paths to citizenship

In Italy, citizenship is acquired mainly through blood ties, as is the case throughout the European Union.

Most EU citizens attain that status through jus sanguinis, a principle that allows parents to pass on their citizenship to their children. Some EU countries allow for a limited version of jus soli, which in its unrestricted form — used in the United States, for example — bestows citizenship on anyone born in the country. Naturalization is usually possible via other routes, albeit subject to conditions.

But acquiring Italian citizenship without ancestral ties or marriage is a particularly lengthy process. The country is one of only five EU countries requiring non-EU citizens to document 10 years of residency to qualify for naturalization. (The EU average is seven years, according to 2018 data.)

Under the current citizenship law, which dates back to 1992, children born to immigrants can apply for citizenship — but only if they apply between ages 18 and 19, and if they can prove uninterrupted legal residency in Italy for their whole lives up to that point.

For children not born in Italy, like Siddique — who arrived in 1999 — naturalization often depends on the status of their parents. As he was already 18 by the time his parents could prove 10 years of uninterrupted legal residency in the country, he wasn’t eligible to apply as their dependent.

He could apply individually as an adult, a route open to all immigrants after 10 years, but it’s a long and difficult path: The waiting time can be as long as four years. Applicants also need to prove regular employment or income — a vicious circle for medical staff that face difficulties obtaining steady employment due to their nationality. (A trainee scholarship, like Siddique has, is not enough.)

There have been efforts to change that. First- and second-generation immigrants have started pushing for citizenship rights, and in 2016 Matteo Renzi’s centrist government made an attempt to reform the 1992 law.

His coalition’s proposal — dubbed ius culturae (Latin for “cultural right”) to contrast with jus sanguinis, “blood right” — aimed to grant automatic citizenship to all children who are either born in Italy or arrived before the age of 12 and who completed at least five years of Italian schooling.

But the vote on the proposal was postponed in summer 2017 amid fierce opposition from both within the coalition and the far right, as the national mood on immigration shifted, with tens of thousands of migrants and refugees arriving in Italy that year.

Then, in early 2018, a populist coalition comprised of the anti-establishment 5Star Movement and the far-right League took power and enacted what critics have labeled as xenophobic laws. The new government also made it harder to apply for Italian citizenship by introducing longer approval times and higher application costs.

These days, the 5Stars — who have been since 2019 in a coalition with the center-left Democratic Party — are striking a different tone. The two parties have been involved in discussions to formally reopen the debate on citizenship reform by mid-2021.

“We recognize it is a lost opportunity when qualified doctors, or valid workers of any field, don’t have the same labor rights as Italians,” says Simona Suriano, a spokesperson for the party.

“We don’t have any prejudice regarding the ius culturae, times are now ripe to extend citizenship rights to those who mainly grew up and studied in Italy,” she added. “But I don’t think either that we would agree to go beyond that and accept, for instance, a ius soli model like that of the U.S.”

‘A loss for Italy’

Italy’s aging population means that the country’s medical staff shortage — more than 10,000, according to 2018 data — is only going to become more acute.

Foreign-born medics could boost their numbers, however. About 77,500 foreign-born health care professionals are qualified to work in Italy, according to data collected by the Association of Foreign Doctors in Italy (AMSI).

They include 22,000 doctors and 38,000 nurses, with the majority working in the private sector as only 10 percent of them managed to access the struggling public health care sector, said Foad Aodi, AMSI’s president.

“There have been around 13,500 [openings] for health care professionals across Italy since the pandemic, but we keep being excluded. We don’t want to take the jobs from Italians, we only ask to integrate in the country we’ve chosen to call home,” Aodi said.

After ASGI, the lawyers’ organization, sent a letter to the Italian interior ministry complaining that many regions were still not complying with the “Cure Italy” decree, some hospitals and regions changed their stance and opened jobs to non-EU applicants.

Yet Alberto Guariso, an immigration lawyer with ASGI, said the organization has found at least seven of Italy’s 20 regions are still not implementing the decree. Even in regions that changed their stance after ASGI’s intervention, the options often remain limited for foreign medics.

For example, Tuscany opened jobs for non-EU nationals recently. “But in terms of rights, it is insignificant,” says Hamilton Dollaku, an Albanian nurse and trade unionist based in Florence, who currently works in the private sector. “It offers a one-year contract with no possibility of renewal. It works through direct calls only” — meaning employment is dependent on the hospitals’ needs — “and many foreigners will rightly refuse.”

Byzantine hiring practices and a lack of suitable positions also present challenges to Italian medicine graduates. But the discrimination is a major factor in pushing foreign-born staff and students to seek their fortunes elsewhere in droves, said Siddique.

“It only damages the image of Italy’s health care system and disrupts our lives, forcing many of us to leave for elsewhere in Europe,” he said.

Plus, he pointed out, it’s a waste of money if the very institutions that spend thousands of euros on training him and others without EU citizenship don’t benefit from their investment.

“We are talking about €150,000 for every [medical student] for the whole duration of studies,” says Siddique. “Excluding us is a loss not just for us, but also for Italy.”

Source: Foreign-born doctors reignite Italy’s citizenship debate

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As Coronavirus Reappears in Italy, Migrants Become a Target for Politicians

2020/08/31 Leave a comment

The phrase “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel” comes to mind:

As the summer vacation season draws to a close in Italy, a flare-up of Covid-19 cases is fueling a surge in anti-immigrant sentiment, even though the government says that migrants are just a small part of the problem.

Sicily’s president, Nello Musumeci, ordered the closure of all migrant centers on the island last weekend, saying it was impossible to prevent the spread of the illness at the facilities. And although a court blocked him, saying that he did not have the authority to close them, his order underlined the challenges Italy faces as right-wing politicians seek to rekindle a polarizing debate about immigration in a country hit hard by the pandemic.

In Pozzallo, a town in southern Sicily that has the highest rate of infection among newly arrived migrants, Roberto Ammatuna, the center-left mayor, has found himself trying to balance fears of a coronavirus influx with an obligation to rescue migrants in distress at sea.

“Our citizens need to feel safe and protected, because we are here in the front lines of Europe,” he said in an interview in his office overlooking the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean. “No one wants migrants who are sick with Covid,” but, he said, “we can’t stop rescuing people at sea.”

In one week in August, 73 migrants tested positive out of about 200 quarantined in Pozzallo. About 11,700 migrants have reached Sicily since June, and 3 percent either tested positive upon arrival or during the quarantine period that the Italian authorities imposed inside shelters.

But Franco Locatelli, the president of Italy’s Superior Health Council, a government advisory body, said migrants’ role in bringing Covid-19 back to Italy was “minimal.”

In the first two weeks of August, around 25 percent of new infections registered in the country were imported from abroad, according to Italy’s National Health Institute. Over half of those were Italians who had traveled abroad, and many others were foreigners who already lived in Italy and were returning to the country.

Less than 5 percent of the total were new immigrants, according to Italy’s Health Ministry.

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In Italy, legal migrants renew fight to be true citizens

2020/08/26 Leave a comment

Restrictive second generation citizenship policies compared to jus soli:

Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, Italy’s second generation of immigrants is renewing the fight for automatic citizenship in a land where migration is at the heart of the political debate.

“Jus soli!”, the Latin term which literally means “right of soil,” or birthright citizenship, has become the new rallying cry among the children of Italy’s 5.3 million legal immigrants.

In early June, thousands of demonstrators marched in Rome in memory of African American George Floyd, who died on May 25 when a white policeman kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes, triggering an outcry in the United States and around the world.

The march spurred renewed vigour among the children and grandchildren of migrants in Italy, who share the language and country’s cultural references but do not have the right to citizenship until they turn 18.

Even then, it is subject to strict conditions and often gained only after a lengthy and heavily bureaucratic process.

“In this country, citizenship is treated not as a right, but a concession,” said Fatima Maiga, who was born in Italy but is of Ivorian origin.

Legal immigrants say their plight has been overshadowed by the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean Sea, which since 2014 has seen more than half a million new immigrants arriving on Italy’s shores.

They claim their fight for citizenship is also weighed down by anti-immigrant sentiment at home, fomented by the far-right League party, which left government in 2019 after only a year in power.

Of the 5.3 million foreigners living in Italy in 2019, around 1.3 million were under 18 and three quarters of those were born in the country.

Among those most affected are the children of Albanians, Moroccans, Chinese, Indians and Pakistani immigrants.

– Italian/not Italian –

Maiga, 28, co-founded Italiani Senza Cittadinanza, or Italians Without Citizenship, in 2016 to help second-generation migrants — known as the G2 — become Italian.

Under a 1992 law, anyone born in Italy can apply for citizenship at the age of 18, on condition of having legally lived here “without interruption”.

However, the process must be launched before they turn 19.

Up until that point, they are given residence permits.

If that window is missed, people can also become a citizen on the grounds of legal residency for a decade and on the condition of a minimum income of 8,500 euros ($10,000) a year over three years.

Nevertheless, the process can take a long time and involve complicated paperwork.

“I applied when I was 18. I had to wait for four years before getting my papers,” Marwa Mahmoud, 35, told AFP.

“I know what it’s like to live as an Italian in everything but in law,” Egyptian-born Mahmoud said.

Mahmoud and others also worry the ongoing migrant crisis — in which hundreds continue to arrive on Italy’s shores every day — is pushing their own struggle further down the agenda.

The numbers of people arriving in this way have risen by nearly 150 percent over the past year, the majority coming by boat from Tunisia, Italy’s interior ministry said last week.

“Our situation is being passed over in silence,” Mahmoud lamented.

“Since Italy started getting embroiled in the migrant crisis it’s like we’re starting at zero again,” she said, adding that Italians “tend to put everyone in the same basket”.

“But the situation of an unaccompanied minor who arrived yesterday is not comparable with that of an immigrant child born and raised here,” she said.

– ‘Not a priority’ –

During his year-long tenure in 2018-2019 as interior minister, Matteo Salvini, the head of the League party, pushed through new rules extending the waiting time to process Italian nationality applications from two to four years.

“Nationality is not a ticket to the funfair,” Salvini said in 2017.

Supported by the G2 network, Italy’s governing centre-left Democratic Party (PD) is now pushing for reforms — among them, advocating for five-year continuous residency to qualify for citizenship.

But so far, the PD’s coalition partner, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, has been non-committal.

Still, a fairer birthright citizenship system is under discussion in parliament.

But “it’s not a priority”, said Giuseppe Brescia, a Five Star deputy, who heads parliament’s committee on constitutional affairs.

The G2 movement now plans to hold a demonstration on September 19 in the hope of advancing the cause of what it calls Italy’s “forgotten non-citizens.”

Source: In Italy, legal migrants renew fight to be true citizens

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Italian fashion brands called upon to tackle racism

2020/08/01 Leave a comment

Of note given history of racist incidents:

Black fashion designers in Italy have called upon Gucci, Prada and Dolce & Gabbana to commit to eradicating racism in the country’s fashion industry, accusing brands of prioritising performative gestures of support for the Black Lives Matter movement in the US at the expense of tackling discrimination closer to home.

A letter written by designers Stella Jean and Edward Buchanan, entitled “Do #BLM in Italian fashion?” asks Italian fashion industry leaders to enact a plan of investment, education and monitoring, instead of a tokenistic approach which earlier this month resulted in no black-owned fashion brand showing at Milan fashion week.

“Let’s change (from) roundtables on diversity and workshops on the theories of multiculturalism … into true work, true collaboration” the letter reads. “Only this will ensure that all of our constant sources of passive inspiration are transformed into valid and active agents of real change.”

Source: Italian fashion brands called upon to tackle racism

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‘We Saw There Is Disparity.’ Italian Fashion World Adopts Diversity Agenda

2020/01/14 Leave a comment

Better late than never:

The Italian National Fashion Chamber is promoting a diversity agenda among Milan’s major fashion houses, a year after several top Italian brands faced criticism for designs and remarks seen as culturally and racially insensitive.

Its manifesto backed by major Italian fashion brands aims to increase racial and gender diversity in key roles in Milan’s fashion houses, which fashion chamber president Carlo Capasa acknowledged was lagging in a recent interview with The Associated Press ahead of Milan Fashion Week.

‘’We have been speaking for many years against discrimination based on gender, religion, skin color and physical ability. But we must acknowledge that this has not been truly implemented,’’ Capasa said. ‘’We looked at our industry and we saw there is disparity. We saw that a disparity of gender persists, that there are conditions not favorable to women in the workplace and in some cases there is discrimination.’’

While Capasa resisted framing the manifesto as a direct reaction to the scandals involving blackface designs by Gucci and Prada, and a Chinese backlash that forced fashion house Dolce&Gabbana to cancel a major Shanghai show, the incidents show the cultural blind spots that can arise when a fashion house is too homogeneous.

Capasa said the Milan fashion world must work harder to attract people of color. “If global companies want to represent the world they are targeting, they must welcome diversity and look beyond their own borders,’’ he said, citing the relative homogeneity of Italian society.

Milan has lagged the other main fashion cities of Paris, New York and London in racial diversity on the runway, according to season diversity reporting by the Fashion Spot. Capasa said the stories that fashion houses want to tell are often linked to their Italian roots, and that runway choices are linked to model agencies’ offerings since not all models come to Milan.

While many Milan fashion houses take their creative direction from women — including Miuccia Prada, Donatella Versace, Silvia Venturini Fendi and Angela Missoni — and more women than men work in the fashion industry, Capasa said efforts are needed to get more women into decision-making roles.

‘’If we look at the boards, at the CEOs, at other key roles, there might be an advantage for men,’’ Capasa said. ‘’But we don’t want to introduce quotas obligating companies to promote women. We want to create the conditions so that women can have the same chances.’’

The chamber’s manifesto does not include hard commitments. Instead, it presents concepts that ‘’will serve as a model for a radical reform in terms of diversity and inclusion.’’

They were adopted by the chamber’s more than 100 members, which include most major Milan fashion houses with the notable exception of Dolce&Gabbana, and will be monitored every year for progress.

They call for changing representations of the standards of beauty on runways and in magazine campaigns, acknowledging that ‘’canons of physical beauty and harmful psychological models have spread throughout the industry.’’ They also present inclusion as a business opportunity that can boost financial results while improving trust with clients.

Gucci and Prada have independently made efforts to address the scandals. Gucci’s efforts include launching a scholarship program to reach students who have been underrepresented in the fashion industry, while Prada announced a diversity council headed by two Americans, artist Theaster Gates and film director Ava DuVernay.

Capasa put the fashion chamber’s initiatives in the context of an ever more globalized industry where 2.5 billion people follow the fashion world on social media accounts and can, with a single post, shift a fashion company’s fortunes.

Meanwhile the center of fashion’s commercial gravity has shifted to Asia, with Chinese consumers accounting for 90% of luxury sales growth last year, according to a study by the consultancy Bain & Co.

“The push to speak about diversity of inclusion comes directly from the fact that globalization made us understand that you cannot speak in the same way that you spoke before,” Capasa said. “The audience has become much bigger.’’

Source: ‘We Saw There Is Disparity.’ Italian Fashion World Adopts Diversity Agenda

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The Chinese Roots of Italy’s Far-Right Rage

2019/12/10 Leave a comment

Good long read and analysis of populism and the far right. Always better to have some fears for the future than not:

Like everyone in her family and most of the people in the factories where she labored in this town nurtured by the textile trade, Roberta Travaglini counted herself an unwavering supporter of the political left.

During her childhood, her father brought her to boisterous Communist Party rallies full of music, dancing and fiery speeches championing workers. When she turned 18, she took a job at a textile mill and voted for the party herself.

But that was before everything changed — before China emerged as a textile powerhouse, undercutting local businesses; before she and her co-workers lost their jobs; before she found herself, a mother of two grown boys, living off her retired parents; before Chinese immigrants arrived in Prato, leasing shuttered textile mills and stitching up clothing during all hours of the night.

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Italy Has an Intolerance Problem. Does It Still Have a Moderate Right?

2019/11/12 Leave a comment

Good if disturbing analysis:
When Liliana Segre, the face of Italy’s historical memory of the Holocaust, was named a senator for life last year, it was something of an honorary title for the 89-year-old grandmother. Segre, who was deported to Auschwitz at 13, No. 75191 tattooed on her arm, has spent her life speaking about her experience. She could easily have remained a figurehead in her new role. Instead, she has used her platform to speak up about minority rights in Italy in the face of rising right-wing populism. In the process, she has become a moral authority and a woman in a position of prominence, in a country that often lacks both.

Today Segre finds herself in the middle of one of the most intense national debates about anti-Semitism and intolerance in Italy in decades, at a time when the country’s right-wing League party has dominated the political conversation with an “immigrants out” rhetoric. Segre has been the direct target of thousands of anti-Semitic messages online, a center that monitors anti-Semitism in Italy said last week. On Thursday, she was assigned a police escort because of threats against her, and after neo-fascists unfurled a banner that read antifa acts, the people submit near an event where she had been scheduled to speak. Two Carabinieri must now accompany her every move.

That anti-Semitism is alive and well in Europe, both online and in real life, and that Jewish sites and community leaders require police protection are, alas, nothing new. But the notion that an octogenarian Holocaust survivor is under threat and is now required to have a police escort stirred strong feelings in Italy and led the front pages of the country’s leading dailies on Friday. A headline on Wired summed up the response: “What Kind of Country Is This Where a Death Camp Survivor Needs a Police Escort?”What’s at stake here is whether Italy, one of the pillars of the European Union, is capable of having a moderate political right, or whether the far right, with its “us versus them” attitude toward ethnic and religious minorities, has definitively absorbed the center.

Britain’s Labour Party has been convulsed by debates about anti-Semitism. In France, Islamist terrorists have singled out and killed Jews. In Germany, a leader in the Alternative for Germany partyasserted that the Holocaust was a “speck of bird poop” in the country’s long history. Italy stands out in this landscape because the most vocal and agenda-setting politician in the country, the League’s leader, Matteo Salvini, has been extremely ambiguous about his party’s stance on Italy’s fascist past. Salvini, who was the interior minister until August and who now leads the opposition, often cites Mussolini, has delivered a speech from a balcony where the fascist leader once spoke, and has held rallies in front of other fascist-era monuments. At a League rally in September, supporters shouted “Get out of here, Jew” to Gad Lerner, a prominent Italian journalist, and Salvini never addressed the issue.

That same ambiguity was on full display last week, when the League and the entire right-wing opposition abstained from a Senate vote on a committee that Segre had proposed to investigate hate speech, racism, and incitement to violence on ethnic and religious grounds. The vote passed and the committee itself is somewhat symbolic, but the abstentions were significant. Not only did the League abstain, but the once philo-Semitic center-right Forza Italia party, led by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, also abstained, as did the far-right Brothers of Italy party. Salvini said it was because he worried that the committee would restrict free speech, such as the League’s slogan of “Italians first.” After Segre was given a police escort, Salvini said he had one too—suggesting that this was no big deal for public figures—then later amended his comments to say anti-Semitism should be condemned.

Giorgia Meloni, the leader of Brothers of Italy, said she didn’t think the committee would adequately address intolerance and anti-Semitism on the part of Muslims. She said that Salvini had denounced anti-Semitism, and that suggesting her party indulged in nostalgia for fascism was ridiculous. But she has also posed in front of a fascist-era monument, to endorse a descendant of Mussolini.

This goes beyond political posturing. The fact is, Italy’s right-wing parties draw support, both moral and electoral, from far-right elements. CasaPound, a far-right group that organizes the demolition of Roma encampments, has supported the League. Salvini hasn’t endorsed its support, but he hasn’t disavowed it either. Abstaining from voting for the committee fits in this pattern. “When you propose a parliamentary committee to investigate language which is useful for the League, it’s impossible for the League to vote for it,” says Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, the director of Milan’s Center of Contemporary Jewish Documents, which conducted the study into anti-Semitism that found Segre was a target.

“The direct and continuous attacks on Liliana Segre, in my view, is not haphazard anti-Semitism,” he told me. They are aimed at Segre “because she has started to do politics. And she’s doing it in a very weighty and direct and intelligent way.”

Segre proposed the Senate committee to monitor hate speech afterspeaking out this month about how she sometimes receives hundreds of anti-Semitic messages a day. (According to the study, the slurs include: “professional Jew”; “jerk”; “senile old lady”; “senator with no merits who profits off the Holocaust.”)

In a recent interview, Segre said that she thought her online attackers were troubled people who needed treatment. “They’re serial haters who need to hate someone,” she said. “Wasting time writing to wish death on a 90-year-old, anyway nature will soon take care of that.” “I don’t forgive,” she added about her experience at the hands of the Nazis. “I don’t forgive and I don’t forget, but I don’t hate.”

The populist right today in Italy and elsewhere derives much of its power from anger and hate, especially toward immigrants. The attacks on Segre are part of a broader wave of intolerance here. Last weekend, fans shouted racist slurs and made monkey noises at Mario Balotelli, a soccer player for Brescia and a star of Italy’s national team. Balotelli, who was born in Italy to Ghanaian parents and raised by Italian foster parents, has emerged as a critic of Salvini, and has spoken out against the racism he has faced.

Late Friday, Italian media reported that Salvini met with Segre that afternoon at her home in Milan. What words the two exchanged aren’t yet known. Salvini didn’t post anything about the meeting on his active Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram accounts. Last weekend, Segre told Corriere della Sera that “if he comes, I’ll offer him tea, cookies, a coffee, but certainly not a mojito”—a reference to Salvini’s appearance last summer shirtless at a beach club, drinking his cocktail of choice. How Salvini and his allies respond to Segre publicly will determine what kind of country Italy wants to be: one that reckons with its fascist past, or one that celebrates it or banalizes it for political gain.

Source: Italy Has an Intolerance Problem. Does It Still Have a Moderate Right?

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Vatican, Jews criticise Italy’s right for snubbing anti-Semitism committee

2019/11/01 Leave a comment

Of note:

The Roman Catholic Church and Rome’s Jewish community expressed dismay on Thursday after rightist parties refused to back the creation of a parliamentary commission to investigate hate, racism and anti-Semitism.

The idea of the committee was put forward by Holocaust survivor and life senator Liliana Segre in response to a regular stream of abuse hurled her way on social media.

The ruling 5-Star Movement and center-left Democratic Party (PD) backed the motion, but the far-right League and its allies, the Brothers of Italy and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, all abstained.

“The abstention of some parties is a bit dismaying. It’s a decision that we consider wrong and dangerous,” said the president of Rome’s Jewish community, Ruth Dureghello.

The Vatican’s powerful number two, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, also weighed in.

“I am worried, in the sense that on some things like fundamental values we should all be united,” he told reporters. “There is a danger that all this gets politicized. We need to break clear of this,” he said.

Segre was deported from Italy to Auschwitz in 1944 when she was 13 – one of some 776 Italian children under the age of 14 who were sent to the Nazi concentration camp. Only 35 survived.

She said this month that social media haters posted an average 200 messages a day against her. “They should be pitied or treated,” she said this week.

The League and its allies said they abstained in Wednesday’s vote because Segre’s motion was ambiguous, in citing, for example, nationalism and ethnocentricity as possible driving forces behind racial hatred.

“By doing that you are outlawing Brothers of Italy,” said one of the party’s senators, Giovanbattista Fazzolari. “This is not a commission on anti-Semitism, as they want you believe, but rather a commission aimed at political censorship.”

While Brothers of Italy and the League, led by Matteo Salvini, have both positioned themselves on the far-right of the political spectrum, Forza Italia sees itself as center-right and some of its leaders were dismayed by the decision to abstain.

“We are betraying our values and changing our skin,” said lawmaker Mara Carfagna, who is widely seen as a possible party leader when Berlusconi finally steps away from the helm.

She has voiced alarm at Berlusconi’s recent efforts to patch up differences with the League and hand effective control of the rightist bloc to Salvini. “We are being dragged along without defending our identity,” Carfagna wrote on Twitter.

The rightist bloc triumphed in a local election in Umbria on Sunday, beating a candidate put forward by the PD and 5-Star by 20 percentage points and ousting the center-left from power in the central Italian region for the first time in 50 years.

The Senate committee will be set up despite the abstention from the rightist bloc, but the 5-Star and PD both denounced their stance.

“This abstention seems to legitimize a culture of hatred that is reflected in society. It is a shameful page in our political life,” said 5-Star lawmaker Elisa Tripodi.

Source: Vatican, Jews criticise Italy’s right for snubbing anti-Semitism committee

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Italy changes course on immigration with new minister Luciana Lamorgese

2019/09/18 Leave a comment

Notable shift:

This weekend, while idling in the Mediterranean Sea between Malta and Italy, the bright red and white Ocean Viking humanitarian ship suddenly set off in a strong, clear course toward the southern-most Italian island of Lampedusa.

The ship had just received permission from Italy to sail to Lampedusa, setting off a wave of relief for the 82 rescued people onboard. It also marked the first tangible evidence of a sweeping change in course to Italy’s — and possibly Europe’s — approach to the controversial issue of immigration.

Italy’s newly formed ruling coalition of the populist Five Star movement and left-leaning Democratic Party has decided to once again allow humanitarian rescue ships to dock here after more than a year of blocking ships under Matteo Salvini, the former minister of the interior. And it has made a swift deal with several EU countries to share the migrants aboard the Ocean Viking.

“Basically Italy is saying to Europe, we’re breaking with the past policy,” says Annalisa Camilli, immigration expert and author of La Legge del Mare – The Law of The Sea. “It’s a big message that Italy has chosen to come back in line with Germany, France and Spain instead of aligning with [anti-migrant] countries such as Hungary and Poland under the former far-right interior minister Matteo Salvini.”

The change comes with the government’s replacement of Salvini with the southern Italian lawyer Luciana Lamorgese. She’s the first woman to hold the job and, says Camilli, could not be more different in style and substance than Salvini.

Lamorgese has a deep and nuanced understanding of immigration policy with more 30 years experience in the Interior Ministry that deals with immigration. She’s the only so-called ‘technocrat’ in the cabinet, with no political allegiances. And she has worked mostly under the radar.

Not on Twitter or Facebook

“Lamorgese has no social profile. She’s not on Twitter or Facebook,” says Emiliana De Blasio, a political expert with Rome’s Luiss University. “She’s super partes and has worked with both rightist and leftist governments. She’s an institutional woman, not a politician, and because of that, Salvini has never attacked her and will find it more difficult to now.”

Until earlier this month when, in a political miscalculation, Salvini ousted himself from government, the far-right leader dominated the discourse on migration in Italy. In his near daily rants posted on social media, he amplified unproven conspiracy theories that humanitarian rescuers colluded with human traffickers; cultivated fears of a migrant invasion even as arrivals dropped by 80 per cent due to EU deals with African countries to try to stop migrants from entering Libya; and lashed out against the EU, while shutting down dialogue with its neighbours.

His refusal to allow migrant rescue ships to dock triggered some two dozen standoffs between Italy and rescuers — NGO, commercial and even Italy’s own naval ships — forcing migrant-crammed vessels to remain stranded at sea for up to three weeks. He also passed two so-called security decrees that cancelled special humanitarian assistance for asylum seekers and criminalized the NGO rescuers.

But if the choice of Lamorgese to replace Salvini signals a radical departure, the move is more political jujitsu than a counterstrike.

“They have seen that politicizing migration has divided the society, and basically they want to overcome this polarized vision of reality by defusing it,” Camilli said.

Lamorgese will do that by quietly getting to work, she added.

Talking with Europe about refugees

Already negotiations with Europe to share migrants and financially penalize countries that don’t are underway, as well as discussions about relaunching an EU naval patrol in the Mediterranean.

Members of the Democratic Party are pushing for Italy to reprise a lead role in setting up  a German- and France-backed EU investment scheme in African countries to stem the flow of migrants and forging bilateral accords with those same countries to take back people who don’t qualify as refugees.

And here in Italy, reforming the country’s antiquated 16-year-old law on immigration is a top priority.

“I think we’re going to be hearing less about the invasion of migrants from the sea and more about how to grant long-term legal status to the 600,000 immigrants who have been living and working as agricultural workers and caregivers in Italy for years,” said Camilli.

Still, the issue of migrant flows across the Mediterranean from Africa is hardly going away. Even with the number of arrivals to Italy under 6,000 so far this year, more than 50,000 migrants crossed to Spain and Greece.

And how European countries deal with the sea crossings will remain contentious and of urgent concern to human rights observers.

NGOs watching how she handles human rights

In Italy, migrant rescue NGOs will be watching closely to see how Lamorgese deals with protecting the human rights of migrants in Libya where they are held captive in overcrowded barracks, tortured and extorted.

Under the previous Democratic Party interior minister Marco Minniti, Lamorgese worked to back a plan that funded the Libyan militias who ran their coast guard to intercept migrant-crammed dinghies and send the people back to captivity. Experts say the move merely fuelled human trafficking. Many migrants whose dinghies later made it past the Libyan patrols reported being trapped in a vicious cycle: Having to pay traffickers to board the rubber boats, being caught by the Libyan coast guard and brought back to the traffickers, only to have to pay them again for another attempt to escape.

“Italian ports will be open to humanitarian rescue ships, but at the same time they’ll fund extra-European countries such as Turkey, Libya, Tunisia and Sudan to block the immigration flows before they reach EU borders,” said Camilli.

Remaining as low-profile as she has been throughout her career, Lamorgese has not made any public statements about her new role as interior minister or given interviews about her plans.

But Democratic Party members of Italy’s new coalition government insist that the country is on a new course.

“Our approach is completely different from Salvini. We’re not trying to stop immigration, but manage it,” says Democratic head Senator Andrea Marcucci. “We must care about human beings and human rights. We must also see the Mediterranean as our future and as a place that provides opportunities and not only a terrible place that links us to Africa over immigration.”

It’s a promise that’s been made by previous governments, Marcucci admits.

But, say observers, if this new government lasts, Lamorgese has as good a chance as any at making inroads.

Source: Italy changes course on immigration with new minister Luciana Lamorgese

Filed under Immigration, Refugees Tagged with ,

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