Italy has been transformed in recent decades from a nation of emigrants to a target country for mass immigration. The change has brought severe political and social tensions. In the first of a series of pieces from Italy, Aidan Lewis looks at how the Roma (Gypsy) community has been caught up in an anti-immigrant backlash.

Police clash with illegal immigrants protesting in Massa, Tuscany, 26 January 2009
Authorities say they are cracking down on illegal immigrants
Across the road from the Italian capital's oldest ethnic Roma settlement, a group of middle-aged men stand sheltering from the rain under the awnings of a local bar, smoking.

They make no effort to hide their hostility towards the residents of Casilino 900, a sprawling collection of wooden shacks and caravans on the eastern outskirts of Rome.

"I'd get rid of them all," says Antonio. "The Italians don't want them here. We're fed up."

His companions signal their agreement. "They turn you into a racist," offers Giorgio. "You're lucky if they don't attack you."

Others in the neighbourhood are more moderate, or guarded.

But the palpable anxiety reflects tensions surrounding Italy's more marginalised immigrant groups that have repeatedly spiralled out of control in recent months.

A series of what appear to be racially motivated attacks and reprisals have contributed to concerns that a creeping xenophobia is infecting the country's social fabric, aided by a political discourse that often links Italy's social and economic woes to immigration.

"Italy is living through a very difficult moment," says Franco Pittau, a senior researcher at the Catholic charity, Caritas.

"When the overall atmosphere deteriorates, people who are already poorly disposed take advantage of it to do bad things."

Roma exclusion

Despite their longstanding presence in Italy, the Roma have been caught at the centre of a backlash that has spread to envelop other communities, and that began in earnest after the October 2007 murder of an Italian woman, Giovanna Reggiani, in Rome. A young Romanian of Roma ethnicity later convicted for the killing was quickly identified as the culprit.

Over the following months several attacks on Roma camps were reported, including one in which Roma settlements in Naples were set on fire.

The Reggiani murder also prompted the first of a series of emergency decrees from the then centre-left government and its centre-right successor that focus on crime and illegal immigration.

A plan for taking fingerprints as part of a census of the Roma last summer was criticised as discriminatory, though ministers said the measure could help protect the community.

Since the elections last April, much of the drive to strengthen immigration policy has come from the Northern League, a populist party in Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's ruling coalition.

Challenged over their approach, the party's politicians say they are simply responding to Italians worried about protecting themselves, their jobs and their identity.

They also point to statistics showing foreigners committing more crime and having a higher presence in Italian jails - though analysts say these are partly explained by the high number of crimes linked to breaches of immigration laws, and the fact that immigrants are less likely to be granted house arrest.

Critics argue that the authorities have treated the Roma primarily as a security challenge in recent months, and have failed to tackle the root causes pushing some Roma into criminal activity.

"That is something that we don't see anywhere else in Europe, it is quite unprecedented," says Rob Kushen, managing director of the Budapest-based Roma Rights Centre.

"There's been a long-standing refusal of Italy to deal with the socio-economic underpinnings of Roma exclusion, and of Roma really becoming a permanent underclass in Italian society."

Reprisals

In the province around the capital, tension flared again last week when four Romanians were arrested for allegedly gang-raping a young Italian woman in the town of Guidonia.
     

TOP IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES
Romania:	625,278
Albania:	401,949
Morocco:	365,908
China:	156,519
Ukraine:	132,718
Philippines:	105,675
Tunisia:	93,601

The day after the rape, separate groups of Albanians and Romanians were beaten up on the margins of a march by a small far-right party.

Later, as the suspects were being driven away from the police station an angry crowd shouting insults and kicking at the police cars had to be restrained by a cordon of officers.

A warning from Rome's Mayor Gianni Alemanno against holding "entire communities" responsible was not enough to prevent continuing reports of reprisals, including a letter bomb that blew out the windows of a Romanian-owned shop.

One person in Guidonia - apparently referring to plans for moving some Roma camps - told local radio: "If they move Casilino 900 here, we'll start a war".

Political comment has once again lumped together Romanians - now Italy's largest immigrant group at more than 600,000 strong - with the Roma, many of whom are long-term residents in Italy and have origins in other Eastern European states.

TBC...

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Christian immigrants committing gang rapes?? Impossible, only Muslims do that!

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This can't possibly be true. From what I've learned here, only Muslims (specifically Palestinians) would ever react by starting a war if foreigners  starting moving into their area. Not those civilised Christian Europeans... This must've been a misprint.

mantra, i think it's great, the more the merrier.

The more diversity we have, the less primary in Australian society Anglos will feel, and eventually they'll have to succumb to the fact that they're just one amongst many.

That sense of loss of primacy unfortunately causes some fears and resentment along the way, but it's inevitable. Countries like Australia, U.S and Canada cannot survive as white only countries, South Africa, Rhodesia etc. proved this. If you dispossess a native people of their land, and try to replace it with a racially pure state, it just doesn't work. As a trade off, you pretty much must agree to make it multi-ethnic and diverse, in order to justify your own position in place of the natives.

The difference in Europe is that Italians, Germans, French etc. are the cultural natives of their respective lands, so they have some kind of position from which to actually oppose immigration. A Sri Lankan friend of mine aptly expressed this once, when I asked him if he preferred living in England (his previous country of residence) or Australia.. to which he replied "Of course Australia, in England when they tell you to go back to your own country, you can't say much, but in Australia you can tell them to go back to theirs".