In some ways it is funny, and in others quite sad, the Pope having been to Lampedusa where he said a blessing over the sea where so many would-be migrants had drowned and quite laudably sought to raise awareness to a wider world audience of the tragedy that unfolds by the day.
Il Messaggero in Italy reported on some phone-ins to Radio Padania, which is a radio station in the north of Italy that is linked to the Lega Nord, the very xenophobic political party that wants, among lots of other familiar-sounding xenophobic things, to split Italy into two countries, north and south.
‘It’s easy enough for him to open the doors of Italy and live in the Vatican’, said Cristina of Bergamo (no h in Cristina in Italian).
‘Why doesn’t he take them to live in the Vatican where there’s lots of room, instead of in Italy where there’s hunger?’, asked Luigi of Milan.
‘I would have expected’, added Giovanna, ‘some words about how they rape and murder’.
‘We shall see the piazza at the Vatican empty this Sunday’, said Laura of Brescia, ‘As a Catholic I am outraged, I have not heard this Pope or any other express concern about the carnage wrought by these people’.
Which is a bit tough on the poor old Pope, it’s hardly his fault that Italy is seeing a massive influx of poor immigrants, and at one level the people phoning in have a point, Italy is facing massive problems with immigration right now, immensely greater than the UK and greater too than Germany though that is primarily because the Germans are organised and the Italians aren’t.
But blaming the Pope for encouraging illegal immigration when he’s trying to show compassion and attempt to raise the profile of the issue can only really be described as rather thick. Kind of sick amusing.
Meanwhile, almost every day during this summer another boat arrives, or is rescued from sinking up to fifty miles offshore, or is not reused and bodies float in the sea, boats containing anything up to five hundred migrants per vessel. Italy is being overwhelmed.
While at the other end of the country Roma gypsies drive in and cause more urgent problems, for despite the comments about murder, rape, and carnage by the people who phone in to Radio Padania, there is little evidence of this with Africans, such murder rape and carnage that exists by immigrants is predominantly Eastern Europeans and especially Roma people.
How do I know that Africans commit relatively few crimes? Well I do because there is a website, http://tuttiicriminidegliimmigrati.com the url of which literally translates as ‘All the Crimes of the Immigrants’.com, where someone, or someones, in Italy collects together stories they find in newspapers online and off- about misdemeanours, riots, or anything else they think is noteworthy relating to immigrants, and reports them, they pick up on dozens of stories daily. It’s kind of the Daily Mail Plus-Plus, in Italian, with a harsh and garish design. Probably would be jumped on by the right-on lot in the UK, but in Italy there are more pressing concerns. I look at it from time to time, I find it quite informative.
I know that Migration Watch UK does daily summaries from the British newspapers about immigration issues, but they’re all rather distant and political, all somewhat out there and arms length, it doesn’t much report on what is happening with the people, daily and on the ground. The all-the-crimes-of-the-immigrants site gives something of a picture of the lives of the people, or some of the people, and oddly in its human-story emphasis it has somewhat the opposite effect from what it is trying to achieve, but then it is Italian, so not so oddly.
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