The Italian exception

UNESCO Courier, Nov, 1998 by Marina Forti

Italy, once a notable source of emigrants, has become a magnet for immigrants in the last 20 years

A few months ago Italy's Minister of the Interior, Giorgio Napolitano, told parliament that "Italy has a vocation as a country of immigration." This is an ironic twist of history. For over a century Italians emigrated on a massive scale, but during the last twenty years the situation has been reversed as hundreds of thousands of people have come to Italy in search of a job and a new life.

They started to arrive in the early 1980s. Women came from Eritrea, where a war was on, and Cape Verde, looking for work as domestic servants. Then the smiling faces of North African cafe waiters and cooks began to appear in cities like Rome and Milan. Egyptian workers could be spotted in the foundries of Emilia Romagna. In 1986, when the Italian parliament passed for the first time a law protecting the rights of workers from outside the European Community, the number of these workers was put at 500,000, out of a total population of 57 million Italians.

The arrival of these newcomers signaled the start of a new trend in a country which had, regional disparities notwithstanding, become prosperous. In the mid-1970s, the other European nations closed their doors to immigration, whereas Italy adopted no specific measures to regulate a phenomenon that was still new. The country also looked with a different eye at its informal "underground" economy in which family members sometimes employed one another, taxes were avoided and black market labour was often used. Immigrant workers - flexible and easily-exploited labour - found a place in that market. They worked in homes, restaurants, stores, services, construction, farming and, little by little, small- and medium-sized companies.

Immigration became a socially recognized phenomenon. At the same time it stirred controversy and in some cases triggered xenophobic reactions. On the one hand, associations were set up to defend immigrants' rights; on the other, there were outbursts of racism, as in 1989 when a gang of young delinquents near Naples murdered an African farm labourer. The killing galvanized public opinion and the government decided to draft a new bill concerning immigration, the status of foreigners and their social rights. The bill became law in 1990 and enabled some 200,000 foreigners to obtain residence permits.

A country to which people come

Italy now has around one million officially registered immigrant workers. A government report published in June 1998 put the number of undocumented aliens at between 200,000 and 300,000. The immigrants hail from an increasing number and variety of places, including the Mediterranean basin, China and the Indian sub-continent. In decreasing order, the largest communities are from Morocco, the Philippines, Tunisia, the People's Republic of China, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Poland, Romania and other East European countries. Recent years have seen an increase in the number of undocumented aliens from the former Yugoslavia and Albania, a direct consequence of war and unrest in the Balkans. The report also says that "some communities have stabilized considerably", citing the growing number of children and the increasing rate of family re-unification.

Italy is still adapting to its new situation as a country to which people come rather than leave. For years informal networks made up of the foreign communities themselves, private support groups, organizations and a few local authorities organized the reception of immigrants. Today the initiatives they launched are often being taken up by government agencies. In the field of health care, for example, a new figure has emerged - the "cultural mediator", who speaks the language and is familiar with the culture of the individual concerned, and offers his or her services as a go-between to facilitate access to health care. There have also been attempts to integrate foreign pupils through multicultural education. In 1996 a little over 50,000 children, or six per cent of the resident foreign population, were enrolled in Italy's elementary and middle schools. School is the most effective tool for successful integration and the key to peaceful co-existence.

An immigration law passed by the Italian parliament in March 1998 established for the first time a coherent legal framework governing admission to Italy and the renewal of expired residence permits. Extremely complicated, if not entirely inapplicable, laws had previously encouraged immigrants not to apply for papers. Anyone who has legally lived in Italy for five years or more is now eligible for a residence permit, which is valid for an unlimited length of time and frees its bearer from eternal "guest" status as well as from the trouble of renewing a permit that has expired. The government is requested to set annual admissions quotas in consultation with the regions and government agencies concerned. In early 1998 the quota was set at approximately 20,000 people but by June the Ministry of Labour had already recorded 34,000 requests.