Migrants as public enemies

Maroni stated that his first actions as minister would concern “security”, heralding the large-scale expulsion of immigrants (he qualified the statement when warned EU norms deemed this illegal by saying there would not be any mass expulsions, only those of criminals), and Alemanno preferred to talk of dismantling makeshift camps inhabited by Roma people, expulsions and legality. Romanians are the preferred target of this discourse, resulting in protests from the Romanian authorities, and the appointment of special commissioners on Roma people has been envisaged by local councils in Milan and Rome.

What’s going on?
Only a month on from the election, the climate appears to have visibly changed as talk of “legality” and “security” has given way to action by the police and municipal authorities, and to a popular revolt in Naples, where reports of an attempted kidnapping of a child by a teenage Roma girl and subsequent headlines talking of Roma generically as “baby snatchers” resulted in Roma settlements in Ponticelli, in the east of the city, being attacked with molotov cocktails, shacks being set alight and Roma having to flee for their lives, amid celebrations by the “security” and legality-loving locals who later proceeded to loot the remains of the camp. Involvement in the attack by clans of the Naples-based Camorra criminal organisation was also reported.

Minister Maroni has explained that he wishes to turn people’s illegal immigration status into a criminal offence (criminalising over half a million people, many of whom have jobs and accommodation, at a stroke), build more immigrant detention centres (CPTs, where abuses and poor conditions have been denounced) and increasing the time limit for which “illegals” can be detained therein, find thousands of illegal overstayers (and migrants who cannot certify their ability to support themselves) to subject them to fast-track expulsion, only allow foreigners into Italy on three-month permits (effectively suspending Schengen) and make DNA tests compulsory to obtain the right to family reunion.

Meanwhile, the first round-ups of migrants and evictions of Roma camps by the authorities are underway. The interior ministry announced on 15 May that nationwide operations against street-level crime that began on 7 May have resulted in 383 arrests including 268 foreigners (mainly Moroccans and Romanians), of whom 118 received expulsion orders (53 were accompanied to the border and 65 transferred to CPTs). The ministry argued that the operation aimed to “send out a strong signal with regards to those crimes that contribute to feed citizens’ perception of insecurity”, and saw 132 arrests taking place in Lombardy, 62 in both Lazio and Campania and 42 in Piedmont, for offences including theft and robbery (177), assisting illegal immigration (111), possession of drugs (92) and for exploiting prostitution (3). It was followed by a night-time blitz in a Roma camp in via Salone in Rome, reportedly resulting in around fifty arrests for irregular documentation and as a result of the presence of stolen vehicles.

While political and religious authorities hastened to condemn the criminal violence in Naples, no one assumed responsibility for stoking the embers that have been carefully kept alight since the murder in Rome in October 2007 that sparked an outcry against Roma and Romanians (see my 2nd blog), and the use of Roma as a straightforward synonym for “criminal” and “Romanian” during the election campaign, in spite of a considerable number of them (known as “Sinti”) being Italian. Moreover, when talking of many migrants’ “irregular status”, no reference is drawn to the fact that hundreds of thousands are living here and working, but are not given the possibility of regularising their positions, through policies that refuse to take the actual situation on the ground into account. The annual quota for migrant workers to be allowed into Italy was set at 170,000, but 720,000 applications were received, hundreds of thousands by housekeepers and carers already working for Italian families. If, as minister Maroni recently stated, “the term regularisation is not part of my vocabulary”, many Italian households will soon be left in a less hygienic situation than is currently the case, or they will be harbouring criminals.