A short primer to growing anti-immigrantion sentiments in Italy

Italians with their long emigration history have often considered, and been considered, by themselves and neighboring Europeans countries to be ‘immune’ from the institutionalized racism experienced our other countries. That might have been the case initially when the influx of non-European immigrants first began to pick up 2 decades ago. But this ‘social tolerance’ has quickly vanished in recent years in light of emerging far-right regionalist and conservative political parties such as the Lega Nord which has seen new explicit and virulent propaganda against the alleged threat of the immigrants. Similarly, Berlusconi - in his attempt to consolidate the already weak plurality he commands in the parliament (45.7%) - has further tightened the border in order to appease the growing far-right constituency of his coalition. Other background factors that have attributed to these growing anti-immigrant sentiments include:

1.) An average influx increase of 11.4% between 1996-2000.

2.) The country has suffered since the adoption of its early modern constitution in post-WW2 from the unclear and underdeveloped immigration and settlement policies with ineffective public administration dealing with the management of immigrant integrations

3.) The idea of immigrant as a ‘problem’ is easy to manufacture in the face of general social and economic insecurity and stagnation. Therefore, immigrants in Italy, like most other countries, became easy scapegoats on a variety of issues:

a. Security threat (Often in the form of poorly evidenced
association between criminality and immigrants-concentrated neighborhoods)

b. Threat to jobs (destabilization of labour market even though immigrants mostly take positions that the Italian labour force already eschew)

c. A threat to cultural and religious identity (a general unpleasant attitude towards non-European and non-Caucasian immigrants often reinforced by the Roman Catholic church by using ambiguous terminologies such as “cultural conflict” in lieu of outright racial or religious discrimination)