Fathers and Refugees

On Fatherhood and Refugees

My father’s father was a refugee. His parents bought him a ticket on a ship coming to America, and charged him with the heavy responsibility of finding some way —in a land he did not know and a language he did not speak— of saving his family.

He was born and raised in a Greek city inside what is now Turkey. For centuries, Greeks and Turks had lived side-by-side there, in peace. But his parents could see a tide of angry nationalism rising. They saw their Turkish neighbors fill their hearts with bitterness; with grievances, some real, some imagined; with hate. So much hate.

My grandfather worked hard and landed a steady job in Colombia.  He brought over family members — sisters, brothers, cousins. By this time, the family-members who stayed behind had lost their homes and their possessions. Women were interred in concentration camps, men in prisons. His younger brother managed to escape by swimming, while manacled to another man, to an American Red Cross ship on a mission of mercy.

My grandfather was a a builder. He was the rock on which my family’s survival was predicated.

My father was a refugee’s son. Born in the U.S., he was proud to serve his country. Barely seventeen, he volunteered to fight in WWII. No good deed goes unpunished, as he would say, and a few years later, as a result, he was recalled to fight in Korea. He served in a frontline regiment with blacks and whites, Latinos and Asians, children of immigrants and children of native-born. For him, this mosaic was the strength and promise of America. It was a country where no one went to sleep fearing that their neighbors would turn them into the authorities for being different.

My father’s defining quality was loyalty. He worked for the same company all his life. When that company went bust, my dad indebted himself up to the eyeballs to keep part of it afloat, in an effort to save jobs, lives. He too was a builder. He fought in wars and forged a company that helped make the American dream possible for many, including my family and myself.

I am the grandchild of a refugee. I was not weighted down with the tremendous responsibilities my father and grandfather had to bear at an early age. I was not drafted. There was no draft when I came of age. I started no companies. I did not buy the life and freedom of family members with my first paychecks. I lived in easier, fatter times.

But I have not forgotten the lessons they passed down. I have no patience for intolerance and hatred of others, it does not matter what the reason. I have no respect for leaders who play on racism and resentment. I know that the fear of immigrants and refugees is more than just nonsense. It is evil nonsense. It is the triumph of the haters and destroyers. 

This week I watched my 14 year-old son graduate from middle school. He seemed suddenly so grown, so adult. My heart filled with pride (and my eyes with tears). I hope to charge him only with the following task — to live a joyous, productive life, in whatever manner he chooses. But, I will also make sure he remembers that he is the great-grandson of a refugee, and that those who do not fight to make history, are condemned to repeat it.

Read the full piece here: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/opinion/2016/06/17/opinion-on-fatherhood-and-refugees/

Football and Fascism -- The Lazio Conundrum

We all have clothes in our closets that we just want to forget we ever owned. Preppy and punk, mohair or leather, they are the textile skeletons of our past lives.  If we go near them at all, its with gloves on.

But some, don't seem to think twice about echoes and ghosts. Take SS Lazio, a professional soccer club in Rome. Lazio is one of the oldest sporting clubs in Italy, with a lot of history under the bridge, some aspects of which, to extend the analogy, are delicate to wear in public.

But the design and marketing department at the club did not put 2 and 2 together, as it were, and unveiled a new kit that has stirred up a hornet's nest of accusations and defensive denials.

When is black just black? And when a political and racial badge? Here is the story....

http://aldianews.com/articles/opinion/lazio-those-who-forget-history-are-condemned-wear-it/40963

Football's 'We Are the World' Moment

The refugee crisis is a major stepping-up moment for the world's most popular, and profitable, sport. Here is my take...

http://aldianews.com/articles/opinion/refugees-welcome-soccer-has-its-we-are-world-moment/40778

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.

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?

Europe Will Be Asked to Pay for Italian Politician's Sins

The legitimacy crisis of Italy's political class is so deep and so broad that it takes your breath away. I used to think that the image of Nero playing the violin while Rome burned was poetic exaggeration. Now I see it was politics as usual.

Over the past week, the country has been wracked by intermittent, and intermittently violent, protest. The protestors are collectively known as the "Pitchfork" movement, but they are not an organized or coherent group. They are a motley collection, united only by anger. Farmers blocked roads and bridges with tractors to protest food imports bearing misleading "Made in Italy" labels; Truckers slowed their rigs down to a crawl, tangling traffic on highways; artisans and small biz owners spoke against taxes and the government in town squares; Students protested cuts in education; Xenophobes and neo-Fascist groups marched against immigration and Europe.  In Turin, the country's hard-hit manufacturing capital, the riot police removed their helmets in show of solidarity and sympathy.

Living under a bridge: As more Italians fall into poverty,
the welfare system has proven woefully inadequate. 

Meanwhile, the response of Italy's political elite has been either to freak out or to freakily try to play the anger to their own ends. The Interior Minister [from the Center-Right] ordered the cops to keep their helmets on and come down hard on "Troublemakers." The Left started talking about how the protests have been infiltrated and hijacked by Fascist groups, a line made easier to believe by a number of video clips showing a small group of protestors giving the Roman salute and showing off tattoos of Mussolini.  Berlusconi, who believes himself to be a bit of a pitch-fork wielding, barn-burner himself [even if the pitchfork is by Versace and is actually wielded by a hired hand] scheduled a meeting with pitch-forkers, only to cancel out when he realized that some of the anger might be directed at him. [Some in the angry mob, it seems, are under the impression that his having been in power 20 of the last 24 years, might have something to do with the dismal state of things.] Beppe Grillo, the leader of the 5 Star protest movement has been cheering the Pitchforks on with his usual subtle message which can be summarized as: Burn, Baby, Burn.

The most freaked-out was Giorgio Napolitano, the 87 year-old President of Italy, who warned Parliament that, if they did not take action to reform the country, a social explosion wasn't out of the question.

Cheering the Pitch-forks: Beppe Grillo and Silvio Berlusconi have looked
to turning the anger to their own political ends. 

Napolitano is a good example of how the Italian political elite rules without having to submit to elections or popular consent. This year he was elected to a second 7 year term as President of the country by the Parliament [and a few other political actors] despite his age  -he will turn 94 before leaving office- and against his stated wishes. The parties in parliament simply could not agree on anyone else and begged him to stay. He has never been voted for directly by the people he represents.

Napolitano was critical in brining the current coalition government into being after no party got enough votes to govern alone. The Left had run on the promise that they would never, never pact with Berlusconi. But, under Napolitano's prodding, they did. Berlusconi agreed to the coalition government and then changed his mind. But when he tried to pull his party out of the government, half of his deputies refused to go. So, in a sense, on both Left and Right, this is a government that no one voted for, no one wanted.

Added to the profound electoral disconnect is a profound immobilism and an unseemly refusal to cut back on the perks of power. For the past year, this circular reasoning has governed: No laws can be passed because on party has a majority; to call a new election and get a new majority, you first need to reform the electoral law; but no reform can be made for want of a majority.  The same logic applies to bills the parliamentarians don't like but which are hugely popular with voters, like cutting politician's salaries and pensions.

The there is also corruption. Despite multiple promises that the parties would run so-called clean slates that excluded anyone under indictment for a crime, this has not fully happened. Dozens of deputies have been elected -in Italy you vote for a parliamentary list rather than for a single candidate- with the impunity from prosecution that comes with it.

The notion that the political 'caste,' as Italians call it, is impervious to public opinion and corrupt to the core is part of the reason abstentionism has risen to higher than US levels. It has also fueled a whole gaggle of angry movements, from Grillo's 5 Stars to the Pitchfork crowd.

There is a sense that the political structure of this country resembles a termite infested house. It is impossible to know how much of the strength of the structure has been hollowed out and whether it could give at any moment. This fear might be fueling Napolitano's urgency; that and the fact he's too old to outrun the pitchforks.

So, what happens if the unthinkable happens? What if the political structure of Italy collapses under its own weight? The good news is that there is an insurance policy in place: Europe. The European Union would pick up the pieces. But, there is also bad news. After years of European enforced economic austerity, Europe has never been this unpopular. It has gone from being the parent who insists that you eat your vegetables, to being accused of, by the xenophobic and racist Lega Nord party of perpetrating a "crime against humanity," that would be accepting Italy into the Euro zone, and requiring that Italy adhere to European regulations on thing like recycling its trash and solving prison overcrowding. Oh yes...and pay its debts. The gall! The gall!

And these demagogues are just getting warmed up. Stay tuned.

Is Europe's Media Making Racism Worse?

Europe is living through a particularly ugly spasm of racism. This time the targets are the gypsies, and the catalyst for the outburst comes from Greece, where police took a blonde 4 year-old from her (dark) gypsy parents on suspicion of child theft.

Unemployed and homeless in Rome.

The picture of the “stolen” blonde girl in dirt-caked tresses was printed and broadcast across Europe, stirring up an old specter: gypsies steal children to exploit and sell. Greek headlines were explicit: “Roma Steal Children” and “Amber Alert: Roma Circuit Snatch Babies.” In the media frenzy following the Greek case, in Ireland, authorities in different parts of the country took a fair-haired 7 year-old girl and a blond 2 year-old boy from traveler parents, the cases are unrelated, except in racism, only to return them both after dna tests showed –unlike in the Greek case-that they were indeed their gypsy parents’ biological offspring.

Living on the water's edge in Rome.

Europe’s fear and loathing of gypsies –known variously across Europe as Rom or Roma or Sinti, or Travelers– is very old and very bitter. It is part of a broader resentment and mistrust of immigrants and outsiders, a rejection that has begun to boil over with the economic crisis and that has been stoked by xenophobic politicians. Immigrant groups across Europe, are profiled by police, discriminated against in housing, and denied social services and benefits. But none, perhaps, are targeted as consistently and shamefacedly as the gypsies. Swedish police keep a file on all gypsies that enter the country. Hungary and the Czech Republic have been found guilty, in the European court of Justice, of denying low-income housing to gypsies and segregating their children in school.  Greek police routinely conduct sweeps of gypsy camps to find what they can find. It was in one of these that the blonde girl was discovered.

But this particular outbreak of racist hysteria has undoubtedly been fed and exacerbated by incompetent reporting and the bad habits of Europe’s media.

Living under a bridge in Rome.

First, there is very little, if any, fact checking of stories. Articles are self-checked with very little editorial assistance or support. Second, there is a pernicious reliance on single sources for stories, with little effort to include a second view or version of events. This is particularly evident when dealing with government authorities. In the Greek girl’s case, the police put out a press bulletin, which was repeated by the press, with speculative elaboration, but without questioning the police interpretation or incorporating other voices. Third, there is a preference in European journalism, including crime reporting, for full narratives, where the blanks of what we don’t know are backfilled by “informed” speculation to provide a more complete and compelling story. Combined with an almost total lack of attribution or sourcing for information, this “fly-on-the-wall” reporting makes for a good read but abysmal journalism. Again, in the Greek girl case, none of the deeply flawed assumptions (that gypsies could not have fair children, that therefore the child was stolen, and that this formed part of a shadowy criminal conspiracy) were questioned by the media. Instead, they were reiterated, and elaborated, and magnified.

In the end, the international attention did serve to identify the biological mother of the Greek girl. She was a gypsy living in Bulgaria. She voluntarily gave the child to the couple arrested in Greece, she said, because she could not provide for her 10 children.