Flood of Immigrants : Italy Faces Up to Its New Profile

Lunch is pasta alla napoletana , roast chicken and an apple. Like the food, the cooks and the servers are Italian, but the 1,300 guests at the daily free meal have barely a buon giorno among them.

The diners eat quickly, with gusto, in a basement soup kitchen near the palace where Nero once celebrated decadent diversions in ancient Rome. These are new Romans: black, brown, white and yellow; Muslim, Christian, Hindu and animist; speakers of Arabic, French, English, Urdu, Czech and Polish. They are journeyers come in jeans and djellabas from the corners of the Earth to seek their fortune alla Italiana.

“We try to give them enough calories to last,” said restaurant manager Pietro Giacobbi. “Many will not eat again until they come here tomorrow.”

Like Nero’s Time

To its own surprise and increasing discomfiture, Italy has become an alluring new Old World for hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Rome is a multiracial city again, as it was in Nero’s time.

A country that once dispatched millions of its own poor across the oceans now finds itself a magnet for the dispossessed from a threadbare East and a teeming South. Some flee political persecution. Nearly all are running from poverty.

The immigration, about 60% of it from black Africa, is changing the face of Rome, and the face of Italy. It is forcing Italians, who are overwhelmingly white and staunchly middle class, to match liberal political ideas against gritty street reality. There are conflicts: social, economic, racial.

“Italy is as racist as any other country with a high standard of living,” said Msgr. Liugi Di Liegro, Rome chief of Caritas, the Vatican relief organization that sponsors the lunch room.

Killing in Naples Area

The racist killing of a South African black in the Naples tomato belt last month is symbolic of Italy’s dilemma and an emerging national preoccupation. Four young Italians are charged with the murder of apartheid foe and political refugee Jerry Masslo.

Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Claudio Martelli attended Masslo’s funeral as a gesture of a government concern later echoed by President Francesco Cossiga. Deploring a growth of “social and racial segregation” that he said has accompanied national economic development, Cossiga called for updated laws to protect Italy’s urban and rural poor.

This week, Martelli presided at a special Cabinet meeting to consider more effective ways of dealing with immigrants arriving in unprecedented numbers. Belatedly, Italy must confront new social attitudes and problems well-known to other major West European nations with longstanding immigrant populations.

Italy is a world economic power today, but it was the slowest of the big West European nations to blossom economically and has been demographically the most ethnically homogenous. In the Italian context, racial and minority problems have usually meant discrimination by the wealthy industrial north against the poor agricultural south.

The flood of immigrants and refugees from the Third World and Eastern Europe adds a whole new dimension to the Italian social fabric.

Registered Foreigners

Three years ago, there were 300,000 registered foreigners in Italy, says Antonio Golini, director of the state’s population research center. Today, Golini estimates that there are more than 1 million foreigners living in Italy, the overwhelming majority of them illegally.

“At the current rate of 100,000 entries a year, in another 15 years there will be 3.1 million--equal to 5% of the national population,” Golini said.

At present, Italy still trails its West European partners. West Germany, grappling with a flood of new immigrants from the east, has a minority population of 3.2 million. Most are Turkish workers. France has 2.5 million and Britain 2.4 million--legacies of their days as colonial powers.

In an old palazzo near the Tiber where Caritas registers new arrivals to Rome, August was a record month, according to office director Alexius Perera, a Sri Lankan urban planner who came to Italy in 1980. The 990 registrations included 306 Poles, 234 Ethiopians, and 130 Somalis.

Italy lacks any central clearing house for immigrants, and Caritas is one of a dozen private and religious relief agencies that help newcomers. It has registered needy arrivals from 97 countries in the past five years.

“I don’t see any end to it,” said Perera. “When you add strife and tension to poverty, probably two-thirds of the world’s people are looking for a change of environment. Many we see claim to be political refugees, but it’s hard to know exactly.”

Remarkably Diverse

As a group, Italy’s immigrants tend to be well-educated. They are also remarkably diverse: paperless Muslims from Sudan as well as thousands of documented-to-the-inch Russian Jews restively awaiting visas for the United States.

The Russians are only passing through. Most of Italy’s new immigrants wish they were, too, but only a relative handful have immediate prospects, and many arrive without realizing that they may stay for good.

When Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II in 1978, there were 100 Polish refugees in Rome. Now there are more than 10,000, most of whom arrived as tourists. Cleaning windshields at Roman traffic lights has been an acknowledged monopoly of former Polish tourists for years.

Joining the Poles have been growing numbers of Romanians, Czechoslovaks and other East Europeans.

The latest crop of African refugees flee not ideology but violence: Somalis from the Ogaden and Ethiopians from Eritrea.

“I was shot, jailed and tortured as a member of the underground. When I heard they were going to arrest me again, I ran,” said Michael Tekle, a 32-year-old high school math teacher from Eritrea who fills empty days in Rome waiting to hear from Canadian immigration officials. While he waits, Tekle lives in the usual kind of immigrant accommodations, sleeping in shifts with two other Ethiopians in a $9 hotel room. The shower down the hall costs an extra $1.50 for each use.

Neighbors’ Complaints

Roman newcomers, Iranians and Iraqis among them, include those who wound up on the losing side of domestic political disputes.

In Sicily, by contrast, there are as many as 10,000 Tunisian fishermen. One Italian newspaper, using the English spelling, calls them “coloureds.” Caritas had to close one office for refugees near the main Termini train station in Rome: neighbors complained there was too much to-ing and fro-ing of black strangers.

These Roman days, Egyptians and French-speaking North Africans stalk streets and summer beach resorts selling rugs, costume jewelry and sunglasses made in Taiwan. West Africans sell belts and wood carvings from blankets on sidewalks. The watch-your-wallet open-air Sunday flea market at Porta Portese in Trastevere, always a Roman carnival, is now also an international bazaar.

Most of the immigrants are legally forbidden to work, but nearly all of them find a way, beneficiaries of historic Italian tolerance for those who break nit-picking laws. The newcomers work cheap. They tend machines, off the books, in northern factories. They are cash ‘n’ carry hod carriers on Roman construction sites and stoop laborers in southern fields.

In the south where unemployment is high, as in the fields near Naples where Masslo was killed, there is an occasional ugly flare of resentment from poor Italians accustomed to earning 8 or 10 times more than an African fruit picker will accept.

Italian Red Tape

A few of the immigrants persevere through Italian red tape. There are success stories: Abdoulaye Mbodj from Senegal is a top-of-the-line, white-coated waiter at the posh Cafe Paszkowski in the historic center of Florence. There are also failures: Immigrants, particularly Africans, make up a disproportionate part of Italy’s prison population. As a group, they also tend to get longer sentences than Italians for the same kinds of crime.

About 40% of Italy’s 200 professional boxers today came originally from black Africa. Maria de Lourdes Jesus, who came from the Cape Verde Islands, is Italy’s first black television anchorwoman, hosting a Saturday afternoon news show especially for immigrants.

Dacia Valent, 26, child of a Somali mother and an Italian father, is a policewoman assigned as a bodyguard for the Mafia-hunted reform mayor of Palermo. Charges are pending against two Sicilian police officers who failed to come to Valent’s assistance when she was insulted by a drunk who was offended by the color of her skin.

Upscale on the Italian immigrant ladder are prosperous Filipinos, who have long been the favorite domestic workers in Italian households. Delia Cruz left her job as a Manila biology teacher 14 years ago: “$300 a month for a high school teacher, no way! Who can live on that, much less support a family?” Cruz, who was joined in Rome by her sister three years ago, makes around $6 an hour as a Roman cleaning lady. They have more work than they can handle.

The Italian government counts 16,000 Filipinos nationwide, but the Philippine Embassy estimates there are 25,000 in Rome alone, and President Corazon Aquino said not long ago that there were 120,000 of her compatriots in Italy, the largest Filipino community in Europe.

150 Chinese Restaurants

Of late, the well-organized Filipino workaholics have been joined by small but growing numbers of Chinese from Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China. There are now 150 Chinese restaurants in Rome. The overnight boom is as remarkable as the fact that Chinese food is the only foreign cuisine Italians widely accept.

Italian officials are now wrestling with a policy paradox that the wave of immigration has made plain to the entire country.

Immigrants come to Italy because there are fewer impediments to getting in than there are in other European countries. But, once they are here, they encounter a society in which they are non-persons--as anonymous as Nero’s slaves. There is no government safety net to care for them, and few laws to protect them.

“Officially, they don’t exist, so how can the state look after them?” asked Golini. “The absurdity is that there are large numbers of Poles who can’t work but who work clandestinely in the open air. When they clean the windshield for a (Cabinet) minister, he gives them a tip like everybody else.”

In the government of Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, there is now debate about social legislation to aid the immigrants who are already here, and talk of a U.S.-style annual quota to restrict new arrivals. That is variously attacked as undemocratic, un-Christian and foolhardy, since critics say it would only drive the immigrants underground without stopping the flow.

With more have-not dreamers arriving daily, there seems to be an emerging consensus, though, that Italy must bring its immigration laws in line with those of its West European partners before internal boundaries within the 12 members of the European Community are erased in 1992.