The False War between Immigrants and the Poor

Street art in working class section of Rome.

In trying to understand the most recent outburst of racist and anti-immigrant violence in Italy, many mainstream analysts have described the clashes - in the poor peripheral neighborhoods of Rome or the public housing projects of Milan and the industrial North - as a war between domestic poor and immigrant poor. But this understanding of the violence, distorts the reality of the events and, in my view, leads to false conclusions. To depict xenophobic violence as a clash between local poor and global poor, is a convenient way for the Italian elite to let itself off the hook of institutional racism and political failure.

At first glance, of course, the idea of a war between national poor and immigrant poor seems reasonable. Poor and poorly educated immigrants do compete with local unskilled labor. They also compete, in Italy, for certain social benefits, like subsidized public housing.  Both of these competitive elements are highlighted by right and left-wing opponents of immigration. Particularly during a time of economic crisis, the argument runs, when there are no jobs and benefits to be had, these should go to citizens only. 

The argument has popular appeal. Xenophobia has done wonders for the National Front in France and is beginning to do the same for the racist Lega Nord in Italy. On the left, too, xenophobia has its converts. The anti-establishment 5 Star Movement  adopted an anti-immigration platform after vigorous internal debate. In the old Red Belt of Italy, old Communist Party voters, have begun drifting to the proto-fascist Lega, on the strength of the immigration issue. And, politically, what politician would pick to defend someone else's poor over one's own?

White Supremacist tag of Communist graffito.

But the very conception of this war between poor and poor is flawed. First, if immigration into a country has to wait for a moment in which there is no competition with locals for jobs and public resources, then it will never occur. In Italy, even during fat years, unemployment and lack of state aid are always issues for the poor. In this sense, Italy is always failing it's poor: failing to create enough jobs to bring unemployment and underemployment down to even US levels, and failing to provide sufficient benefits - public education, housing, social services like day care and health care - to lift the poor out of poverty.  There is never a time when these resources, jobs and benefits, for the poor, are not scarse. The precondition of no competition with the local poor, is tantamount to saying no immigration, ever.

Second, in this struggle of the poor against the poor argument, job competition is privileged to the exclusion of all other forms of social and economic activity.  Immigrant do compete for jobs, but they also rent rooms in poor neighborhoods, and buy food and clothing in local stores, and, if given a chance, open new businesses which create new jobs. In the United States, 17 percent of all new businesses are started by immigrants, according to the Small Business Administration. Almost all studies show a net positive effect between immigration and job creation - more growth and more jobs, eventually for all.

But for Immigrant to fully contribute to an economy, they have to be allowed to contribute to the society as well. Rules limiting what immigrants can do, and achieve, make immigration less valuable to the society. Ironically, by trying to protect the country's poor in the short-run, by making jobs and benefits harder to get for immigrants, Italy hurts their own economy, and their poor, in the long-run. 

By excluding immigrants from subsidized public housing, Italy closes it's eye to unsafe and unsanitary living conditions in illegal, but openly tolerated, camps and abandoned buildings. By making it harder to legalize one's status, Italy makes it likely to force people into informal and casual labor arrangements. The government drives people and jobs underground, in effect, reducing the amount of money that goes to the poor, and the local businesses that cater to the poor.

Public housing outside Rome, complete with swastika graffiti.

Not only has the Italian government chosen to make the life of immigrants more difficult, in a failed effort to discourage immigration - or rather partly failed, it has succeeded in keeping away educated, affluent professionals - but it has also made it difficult for their Italian born children to gain citizenship. This, of course, weakens the immigrant communities loyalty and commitment to life in Italy. It denies immigrants in Italy with one of the fundamental forces that bind immigrants in America to their new country, the future welfare of their American children. As a result, Italy is in danger of replicating a Middle Eastern rather than a New World model - not immigrants, rather guest workers, without rights or commitment or full involvement with the country.

But immigrants are not abstract entities, they have their own histories, religion and culture - and skin color - and here we come face to face with the social and cultural issues that fueled the anti-immigrant riots outside Rome, in the poor area of Tor Sapienza, Tower of Knowledge. The immigrants and political refugees huddled in fear inside the "welcome center" while a rampaging mob attacked the building with clubs and stones and fought with police, were black and Muslim, the rampaging mob was white and Christian. And this racial and cultural fact cannot be white-washed, as it were, in a discussion of poor vs. poor.  The mob was very clear about what it thought of black people. And that Italian racism deserves to be examined on its own, unqualified by discussions of poverty, in a post of its own. The next post.

The War on Immigrants

The riot police in full metal gear kept pushing the crowd back trying to get them to disperse. But every time the crowd dispersed only to reform again and attack the immigrant dormitory with stones and bats. Inside social workers barricaded themselves all night, manning barred doors and first floor windows, while refugees, many of them unaccompanied minors, huddled in fear in their rooms.

A scene from a movie? Children of Men? Or a dystopian novel on like Ink? No. This scene was all too real and happened last week at a refugee relocation center, a "welcome" center in Italian, on the outskirts of Rome. Tor Sapienza, the neighborhood is called, Tower of Knowledge.

Abandoned and decaying buildings dot the periphery of Rome.

The battle raged for three nights, and was followed by a major demonstration in which locals pelted the mayor of Rome with insults and demanded the closing of the center. Authorities decided to move the children to another facility, in another blighted neighborhood, Infernetto, or Little Hell, for their own protection. But this prompted a similar violent outburst in that neighborhood as well, and the frightened kids were bused back to Tor Sapienza.

At first, the Italian press depicted the violence as a spasm of racism. And, there is plenty of racism to go around -- from the demonstrators' descriptions, to the press, of black people as animals; to the targeting of all brown and black people for abuse and retaliation; to the chanting of the racist mantra that Italy is for the Italians, meaning whites only.

A Rom (Gypsy) camp in the outskirts of Rome.

But soon, the public discussion took a different turn, that of analyzing the incident as a war of poor against poor. A second set of neighborhood voices tried to tone down the racialist tones and emphasize that Italy, and the Italian State, has failed them. The pointed to rising crime in the neighborhood, the lack of public transport, the decaying infrastructure, the garbage that never gets picked up by the city... Locals complained that, in addition to the refugee dormitory, there was a Rom (ie Gypsy) camp nearby, which adds to the density of displaced, jobless, men floating through the area.

After three days of riots, and a couple of headlines noting his absence, the Mayor of Rome, Mayor Clown people are calling him,  finally visited the neighborhood to met with the angry locals. He immediately caved to demands to close the center to all except women and children. Prompting anger from both pro-immigration groups who want the center's work to be validated and protected and locals who want it shut completely.

Mayor Clown blamed the Government, that is, the Ministry of Justice which runs immigration policy. The Minister of Justice called Mayor Clown a ... well, clown, and also blamed the European Union for its inflexible immigration and refugee policies.

The right has doubled down on it's National Front-like strategy of riding the anti-immigrant wave to votes in the next election. The Left is torn between defending the migrants and rending their garments over the loss of working class (white) support.

But, in my opinion, to dismiss this violent spasm as a poor person's movement ("war between poor and poor") or a protest against the failure of the Italian State, or a popular rejection of immigration ("the illegal invasion" the right calls it), is to miss it's essence.  This is, I believe, a fundamental battle over the shape of Italian society and it's future. And I will spend the next few blog posts, teasing my ideas out.

The Extraordinary Humanity of Romans

One of the roads I walk almost every day intersects with the commuter rail tracks heading South of Rome. There is a pedestrian underpass, long, dark, dank, every centimeter of surface covered with graffiti. A homeless man lives here. Call him Carlo. He sets up a folding table with two chairs and a deck of cards. He lays some books out on a blanket. Throughout the day, passers-by stop to peruse the volumes he's laid out and talk about the books they are reading. Some stay to play a game of cards.

There is clearly something off about Carlo. His everyday life could not stand in greater contrast to those of his neighbors in the middle-class quarter of Rome which surrounds his grimy, well-trod den. Outside the sun shines, the sky is blue, there are plenty of derelict buildings and vacant lots where other homeless individuals have thrown up tents or huddle under blankets. But Carlo is not simply a homeless person. He is, in fact, a valued member of his neighborhood. And he is treated as a neighbor, despite his houseless-ness.

On a corner of the piazza where I go everyday to buy food or have a morning coffee, lives a man in his late sixties. He huddles on a box crate, surrounded by assorted cardboard boxes overflowing with stuff. He spends his day writing sentences in a flowing hand on the pages of a spiral notebook. Neighbors stop to talk and say hello. A lady and her grandson drop off a casserole with food for him to eat. He pulls out some sort of toy from his bundles of bundles. Another neighbor bought him a tent, long since lost, for the winter, when it rains almost everyday.  A local street artist made a graffito portrait of him, which he would sit next to, until the manager of the supermarket asked him to move because he was in the way of exiting  customers.

When people stop to talk, they greet him with a kiss on both cheeks, Italian style. They converse of local events, people they know in common. This is very different from the polite but prophylactic "good day" uttered to the beggar. Both of these homeless men are treated with a humanity which is both gentle and deep. There are no statement being made here, no pompous examples for the benefit of appearances or the good of the soul in the hereafter. No. These are Romans at their marvelous best.

A hundred meters or so from the underpass, is the river, the Tiber. It is a social no-man's land, a sort of border region where most Romans never go. Here there are also homeless people, mostly gypsies and foreign migrants, who have set up house. They collect furniture, cook food, defecate and bathe in the river. The belong to no community and are neither spoken to nor cared for. Not even the representatives of the state --the police or the park workers or the sanitary authorities-- seem to take note of their existence. And, every working day, early morning after the sun rises, bike commuters zip by on their way to work, and Roman joggers, grunting and feeling virtuous in the morning chill, pass without a glance.

It blows my mind that a place can live comfortably with both such caring, and such neglect.

Fear of Ebola Used to Stir Anti-Immigrant Paranoia in Italy

Here is a column I wrote for Al Dia. http://aldianews.com/articles/opinion/fear-ebola-used-stoke-anti-immigrant-fears/35069

Mario Balotelli, Luis Suarez, and Italian Racism

A figurine of Mario Balotelli between those of two
holy men: Pope Francis and Francesco Totti.

One star scored the winning goal against England, did nothing much in a loss to Costa Rica, and was replaced at half-time in the decisive game after getting a yellow card for a stupid foul. The other scored the winning goal against England, sat out a loss to Costa Rica due to injury, and committed an outrageous foul that elicited global scorn and got him banned from the remainder of the tournament.  Guess which star is being ostracized and singled out as the embodiment of flawed egoism.  Yes, the black man who plays for the white country.

After Italy's elimination from the World Cup, by toothsome Luis Suarez and Uruguay, a tidal wave of angry criticism of Mario Balotelli swept through Italian media and the Internet.

Balotelli is accused of being lazy and not trying, of being childish and unable to control his temper, and committing a stupid foul that forced his coach to bench him at a critical time. The coach, the argument goes, says he was worried that Balotelli would commit another dumb foul and get himself ejected, forcing the team to play with one man down. The great irony is that another Italian player, Marchisio, actually got himself ejected from that same game, and, yet, is not blamed for the defeat. Bad call by the referee, Italian pundits moan.  Marchisio, by the way, is white.

Italian soccer has been rocked
by repeated racist incidents.

Balotelli is further charged with failing to carry the team into the second round. He was the offense of the team. It was designed around his particular skills. This is often the case with great talents. Portugal is designed around Cristiano Ronaldo.  He scored one goal, just like Balotelli, and the Portugal are also out. Sweden is built around Ibrahimovic, and they didn't even make it to Brazil.  Uruguay is structured around Luis Suarez (with all due respect to the talented Edison Cavani), and his oral fixation has most likely condemned the team to a quick exit. The failure of these teams has lead to some grousing about their mega-stars, but no cascade of hate and blame, even in the case of Suarez where global shame is being heaped on the player.

All of these players are superstars. They receive a disproportionate amount of attention and are paid outrageous sums of money to play, what is in essence, a kid's game. Along with the inevitable envy of their riches, fed, in some cases, by outsized egos and by relentless publicity, there is also a baseline of admiration and respect accorded to great players by fans. And come World Cup time, by co-nationals. There is solidarity and loyalty.

But not with Balotelli. He was immediately fingered as the culprit by his fellow players. Balotelli left the team locker room alone, and sat on the bus alone, while the coach bade goodbye to the  rest of the team. He was subject to racist rants and posts on the internet. Italian fans regularly greet Balotelli with the chat that "there are no black Italians." And on TV, despite a general consensus the the whole team played badly, only one player was singled out for blame: Super Maro.

African immigrants in the police
immigration center.

Balotelli, in a raw post on instagram, responded to a fan's accusation that he had not tried because he was not a real Italian. His response is heatbreaking: I was born in Italy, he writes, and chose to be Italian. He then lashes out at the lack of solidarity he feels from his fellow Italians. Africans are smarter than us, they do not turn on their brothers, he pleads. This last comment, of course, was received as a slap in the face by the Italian media. Poisonous, one pundit describe his post. Out of bounds, declared a football official. Not the racism Balotelli is regularly subjected too, one supposes, but the temerity of comparing Italian unfavorably to Africans.

After the loss to Uruguay, the Italian national coach and the director of Italy's national football federation presented their resignations. The witch hunt rages on. Mario Balotelli, a black Italian, is the perfect outsider - too young and rich and talented. Too tall. Blame him. Rip him to shreds.

Racism and Obama's Visit to Rome

U.S. President Barack Obama's visit to Italy has stirred up a number of embarrassingly racist reactions. This front page, for example, from the Left-wing  daily  newspaper Il Manifesto, is so blatant and cringeworthy, one has to ask, was it done intentionally or just the result of colossal incompetence?

More ominous,perhaps, is the bizarre show of support for Russian President Vladimir Putin by a motley crew of European white supremacy groups and right-wing political parties. Even former Italian Prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and radical comedian turned political firebrand Beppe Grillo got into the act. 

Berlusconi is Putin's old buddy. And Grillo likes throwing gasoline on fires, but how much of the rest is motivated by simple racism?

Italian Politics Take a "Game of Thrones" Turn

Italy gained a new government this past weekend, and did so with all the intrigue and drama of "Game of Thrones" (minus the bloodshed and the chain mail armor, but not the sex).

Matteo Renzi has used is position as Mayor of Florence
to showcase a problem-solving, ideology-lite approach.

The new Prime Minister is Matteo Renzi, the ambitious 37 year-old mayor of Florence, who has made a career by running against the leadership of his own center-left political party, the PD. In this, Renzi has been absolutely brilliant. He recognized, much like Berlusconi before him, that the old guard that ruled the PD were not only out of touch with Italian voters, but also unrepentant, even proud, of that fact. He pushed for internal party primaries to determine it's leadership and, though he lost, did well enough to go from relative nobody to political star. And when the old guard's candidate ran a disastrous campaign, squandering a once-in-a-lifetime sized lead to cross the wire essentially tied with a discredited Berlusconi and comedian-turned-political-gadfly Beppe Grillo, Renzi was the only figure left standing in the wreck of the left.

Well, not the only one. One of the princes of the PD, Enrico Letta, was able to put together a deal with Berlusconi to form a coalition government, one that joined center-left and center-right, representing two-thirds of the electorate. In theory, this would give Letta a broad mandate to govern; in practice, all the government's energy was spent, it seemed, holding itself together. It's biggest achievement was to survive an attempt by Berlusconi to tumble the house of cards and call for an early vote. Stability was Letta's byword. Not change. Not reform. Stability.

This might have worked, if Italy were not going through the biggest economic crisis in its history. And, if Matteo Renzi were less ambitious. While Letta fiddled, Renzi took control of the shattered PD. He handily beat the candidate of the old left, to become party president and, soon after, started turning up the pressure on Letta to do something.  But, of course, as all could plainly see, Letta had no space to maneuver. Like a junkyard car, his awkward coalition of enemies could only hold together at rest, in the absence of sudden moves.

Renzi had always vowed that he would not become Prime Minister without winning a national election. (This is why enemies within in his own party have blocked an electoral law from passing, so there can be no new elections to win.) He also promised to "help" his "friend" Letta but, as Letta slowly sank in public opinion, with European elections looming, Renzi, perhaps sensing that he was caught in a trap, engineered a palace coup, replacing Letta's unelected government with his own posse.

Mired in a deep legitimacy crisis, Italy's
political class fear that the bells toll for them.

Renzi'a new cabinet is young, most of the ministers are under 40. A full half of the ministers are women. Both are revolutionary developments in a country heretofore dominated by old men. The media, both left and right, responded with horror and sexism and disdain. Talking heads commented and criticized the clothes the new women ministers wore to be sworn in...too bright, too tight, too too...  None of the ministers was a heavyweight, pundits sniffed.  And Renzi's inaugural speech to congress, left pundits and pols aghast. It was actually directed at the Italian people and not at the parliamentarians and journalists, the horror, the horror.

The Italian political elite's rejection of Renzi, and this includes the big left and right newspapers, has much to do with their mistrust of popularity and elections.  For the Left, elections are what they lose because the Italian voters are befuddled by too much TV and too much soccer.  Each of the major figures of the PD, each a grey party apparatchik with no aptitude or respect for modern electoral politics, has been defeated by Berlusconi in an election. Each of them, instead of retiring to the Italian equivalent of Kansas (Emila Romagna?), has hung-on to their political retainers and chunk of political turf. And they spin webs and scheme their return while ostensibly selecting the next center-left champion to serve as Berlusconi fodder. That is, until all this primary nonsense spoiled the party.

One the right, there is the fear that there are no conservative voters in Italy, only Berlusconi voters. The former premier looms over everything, consuming all the oxygen in the room. Because he is a convicted felon, guilty of tax fraud, and also of paying for sex with a minor, and perhaps soon of bribing a Senator, Berlusconi cannot run for office. But he seem determined to not let anyone else run in his stead. The center-right is his soccer ball, as it were, and no one else is allowed to score.

So, Renzi makes everyone nervous. He is too ambitious, moves too fast, is too young and too popular. He represents a threat to the usual game of thrones. Or he did, at least, before he assumed power. Now that he is Prime Minister, he has to do what Letta could not: Act.

Much like bayonets, one can do anything with power except sit on it.

Is the Sun Setting on the Italian Lifestyle?

Seen from the outside, there is something inspiringly right about how Italians live.  They close up shop to eat a home cooked lunch every day. They buy their food fresh; personally know their butchers and bakers and candlestick makers; spend a month (or two) on the beach in the summer and a week (or two) on the ski slope in winter.  And they own houses, often in stunningly beautiful locations. Italy has one of the highest homeownership rates in the world, and few kids and shrinking families mean that properties are often inherited from both sets of grandparents as well as parents. City apartments are rented out. Country homes are used, if for nothing else, for olive trees, from which they press, their own oil.

A declining industrial power, Italy is finding that
it can no longer afford to live Italian style. 

Seen from the inside, Italian families are trapped inside a compression chamber. They work long hours, the lunch break is offset by working late, often six days a week. Wages are low. Promotions are out of the question. And yet, those with a job, no matter how grinding, are grateful, because most people under 40 have given up on getting staff positions. They subsist on short term freelance contracts. No bennies. No security. No niente. To lose a job in Italy is a form of economic death.

And the home cooked meals? They have to be cooked by someone. Italy has the lowest percentage of women in workplace in old Europe (after Greece). Italian women cook and keep house (Italian men know how to make coffee), do the daily food shopping, keep house, and care for the children and elderly parents (the state neither provides daycare nor elderly care). Grown children, often unemployed, live at home into their forties.  

And the houses? Those rented are used to supplement the meager family income, and as a trust fund for unemployed offspring. Landlords live in terror of the deadbeat tenant. It can take decades to evict someone. Those houses not rented, decay. Families age and shrink. Less space is needed, maintained. Italy is house poor, falling into ruin.

Fresh food means constant shopping.

Falling slowly but surely into economic destitution, most Italians use tricks to survive. They cheat on taxes. They skimp on maintenance of their properties. They stop paying rent, buying medicines, eat less.  But this cannot last. 

Is there a way out? Perhaps, but it runs against all the  conservative Italian instincts: 

To create more jobs, make it easier to fire workers. The fact that no one can be fired from a job functions as a curse on the poor, because new jobs are not created or filled. Those who have job, even ones they hate or are under-qualified for, hang on to their jobs with a white knuckled death grip. No one takes a chance on something new. Greater job insecurity, ironically, would increase the turnover and vitality of the job market. 

To get money flowing in the economy, tax property. Real estate is to Italy what the stock market is to the US and savings accounts are for Germany. That is were the wealth is stashed. But real estate is not a productive investment, a house, unlike a business or an investment, does not create jobs. By taxing home ownership, and using the revenue to reducing taxes on labor,  Italians would be forced to sell and spend the gain on something more productive for the economy. But this is hard for Italians, barely making ends meet, but inheritors of a long tradition of valuing home ownership, to swallow. Berlusconi made much hay campaigning against this in the last election. 

Falling surely into destitution,
most Italians use economic tricks to survive. 

To get the population off the death spiral, it is time for welcoming immigrants, and their new ideas and habits and demands, instead of fighting them every step of the way. Italy needs growth and investment, and that requires loosening all the state regulations that keep the economy and society an insiders-only game. Let the sunshine in. 

So, to create more jobs, Italians need to give up job security, lose their second homes, and let go control of what their country looks like (and sounds like). In essence, to gamble on an uncertain future, while relinquishing some of the social gains that made the past more stable and secure.

In other words, to save the Italy, Italians may need to relinquish what, from the outside at least, is seen as the Italian lifestyle --slow, sweet, unchanging.