Italy’s Migrants Moving Up to Front Office

Her Italian is nearly perfect. Her demeanor is quietly polite. But the sommelier at Il Pagliaccio, a tony restaurant in Rome’s historic center, isn’t your average Chianti expert.

Diners are often shocked to see Kana Oya, a native of Japan, sniffing their corks and pouring their Pinot Grigios. Oya, 33, is one of an emerging class of immigrant workers in Italy who have moved beyond the anonymity of kitchens and cleaning crews to better, more visible jobs.

Their ascent shows that Italy, well behind the rest of Western Europe, is taking tentative steps toward accepting and accommodating its nascent multicultural identity.

And it reflects the growing importance of immigrant labor in a country with one of the world’s oldest populations, lowest birthrates and a stagnant native-born workforce.

Thanks primarily to immigration, Italy’s population is stable. The number of legal immigrants in the country rose by 66% in the last four years, and a new report by the country’s largest trade federation estimated that immigrant labor now accounts for 10% of the economy in Lazio, the province that includes Rome.

But immigration in Italy is a relatively new phenomenon, and Italians are grappling, ambivalently, with how to integrate new faces into what is still a largely homogenous society. Illegal immigration remains an especially contentious issue, and the government is clamping down even as the need for imported workers grows, in fields and in factories.

Japanese store clerks have been common for some time at Rome’s most expensive boutiques along the Via Condotti, where rich Japanese tourists flock, and English-speakers are sought at other high-end establishments. But most immigrants work behind the scenes and are only gradually moving to the front office.

Juney Lagar, a black Cuban, is among those who have made that move. She deals with customers at a photography shop near the Spanish Steps that caters to tourists and Italians alike.

She doesn’t complain of overt hostility but says she notices a subtle aloofness in her Italian customers, “a difference” when they see her. And like many immigrants, Lagar, 32, says she thinks she’s being paid considerably less than an Italian employee would earn.

“You work hard, you make a lot of sacrifice,” said Lagar, who came to this country 2 1/2 years ago after marrying an Italian.

Oya, the sommelier, came to Italy six years ago, following what she calls her passion for wine. She immediately began taking courses in Italian wine, studied Italian language and traveled the country, learning about regional vineyards and vintners.

However, she had several strikes against her when she attempted to get steady work as a sommelier: Not only was she an Asian immigrant and not Italian, but she was also a woman. Oya embarked on the somewhat enviable task of dining at many of Rome’s major restaurants, always with her resume in her purse. At the establishments she liked, she asked for a job and handed over a copy.

Finally, it paid off. Paolo Dianini, the manager at Il Pagliaccio, hired her a year ago.

“I still feel some Italians don’t accept me,” Oya said. “But this is my challenge. It makes me grow.”

The diversity represented by Oya and Lagar remains small, and immigrants like them who are identifiably foreign still must overcome discrimination and rejection.

One of the most formidable hurdles they face, immigrants say, is boringly bureaucratic but which affects every aspect of their lives.

A tough law enacted two years ago has made it more difficult for legal immigrants to renew their residency permits, creating an enormous backlog. Immigrants recount nightmarish tales of wading through the red tape for a year or more, becoming technically illegal -- unable to travel, seek medical care at state hospitals or sign any contract.

According to the Roman Catholic relief agency Caritas, 600,000 immigrants in Italy -- or a quarter of the estimated number of legal immigrants -- are waiting to renew their permits.

Waving signs that read “Permits for everybody!” a group of immigrants staged a 10-day hunger strike in September to protest the difficulties they were encountering. Officials promised to try to streamline the processing, but improvement has yet to be seen.

Taifur Rahman, a 14-year taxpaying resident from Bangladesh, has spent 12 months trying to renew his permit. Because his papers weren’t in order, Rahman, 41, lost a chance to buy a restaurant that he’d had his eyes on for years (and, he says, the $13,000 down payment).

A prominent member of the 40,000-strong Bangladeshi community, Rahman speaks Italian well and says he has not faced discrimination in the workplace. But acceptance is another thing.

“I invite my Italian neighbors to my home, but in 14 years, I’ve never been invited by an Italian,” he said. “I do not see Italian society opening its doors to us. We remain a separate community. A multiethnic society may be something for our children, when they grow up, in Italian schools and with Italian friends. Maybe the next generation.”

The law that complicated residency permits, and that also made it easier to deport out-of-work immigrants, was declared unconstitutional by Italy’s Supreme Court this summer. It remains in force, however, and members of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing government are looking for ways to amend and keep the law.

Immigration is a source of constant debate here. The government this year granted legal foreign residents the right to a limited vote in local elections. But it is also trying to muster European support for detention camps in northern Africa to keep people from trying to reach Italy’s shores.

Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu last month spoke of the need to increase Italy’s quota for foreign-born workers. “We need immigration,” he said. “Welcoming these people is not only a humanitarian act but a necessity.”

“Over my dead body,” said Roberto Calderoli, minister of institutional reforms from the xenophobic Northern League political party, a member of Berlusconi’s coalition government.

The profile of Italy’s immigrant community is changing as it grows. In addition to becoming more Muslim, with an influx of Moroccans, Tunisians and Bangladeshis, the community is no longer made up primarily of working-age males but increasingly includes women and families, said economist Riccardo Faini of the University of Roma Tor Vergata.

“Families need to be integrated into Italy’s social fabric,” he said. “That means schooling, social and medical assistance, and, eventually, civil rights.... Italy historically has been a meeting point of many peoples, since the Roman times, so I don’t see why it should be so difficult to integrate.”

But sociologist Franco Ferrarotti thinks Italians’ willingness to accept “the other,” especially in these times of terrorism fears, is actually decreasing.

“And so we have the triumph of prejudice,” he said. “You see Algerian women and think they’re prostitutes; Albanians are robbers, and so forth. There is an unreasonable fear of the foreigner. We are afraid of the people we so badly need.”

Dianini, the restaurant manager who hired Oya, said he believed having a Japanese sommelier had worked perfectly in his establishment. Yes, Italian diners occasionally test her and quiz her knowledge, but Oya passes with flying colors. He acknowledged that it helped that his restaurant was high end with an esoteric menu, not the traditional trattoria.

And would Italian diners accept a black waiter? Dianini hesitated. Sure, he said optimistically -- “in five or 10 years.”