Debated issues...

photo by luisa brehm

Another Skype exchange, another American partner! This week I’ve talked with Artem, with whom I’ll be working on the final project during the next month. After the usual problems with the headphones and the starting of a conference (Alessandra and Sara were supposed to talk with us as well), we decided that the topic of our research will be death penalty: it won’t be an easy issue to deal with, but I think it’s a very interesting and challenging choice. This project will hopefully help us to understand the reason why in some American States this kind of sentence is still used although the international community strongly ask for its abolition. We could also compare the American reality with the Italian judicial system. In our country death penalty was substituted long ago with the “ergastolo”, that is life imprisonment; however, the period of confinement has been recently reduced to some twenty years, a kind of punishment that a larger and larger part of Italian public opinion doesn’t consider sufficient for people guilty of heinous crimes. So, what’s the best solution? Is it something in between? We’ll see.
My group and I spent the rest of the time discussing another much debated topic: immigration. Artem comes from Ukraine, so we asked him if he feels that his everyday life is affected by his different origins. He explained to us that he doesn’t consider himself an immigrant because he’ll be staying in the USA just for four years to complete his studies and then he’ll come back home; beside, American universities are sort of “melting pots”, taking in people from all over the world, therefore in such an intercultural environment he certainly doesn’t run the risk of feeling a stranger.

However, he said that the American society tends to treat immigrants in different ways according to their nationality and – above all – to their financial conditions: as I wrote in the forum, Artem acknowledged that people coming from Europe are usually far better accepted than immigrants from Latin America and other poor countries. This happens for two main reasons. The first one is that while Europeans generally move to the USA with a legal permission to work and study in the country, Mexicans, Porto Ricans, Jamaicans, Filipinos flee from the conditions of extreme poverty they experience in their homelands, ignoring American immigration policy and crossing the frontier illegally. Secondly, Artem reminded us that people who struggle everyday to eat and survive are ready to work even for very low salaries, thus becoming way more competitive than their American colleagues. Therefore, they are accused of stealing American people’s job and for this they are excluded from social life and compelled to live in very closed congregations relegated in certain areas of the cities. We shouldn’t forget that Italian immigrants in the USA experienced this kind of “ghettoization” as well: “Little Italy” was the Italian neighbourhood in New York. By the way, Artem said that the situation has changed over the last decades and now Italians are no longer associated just with “pizza” and “mafia”, but with commitment and high quality as well thanks to their hard work. I hope that the other ethnic groups will go through the same kind of social transformation as well in the near future.