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.

What do we know about immigration?

photo by celikins

Last year I took the exam of “Geografia della popolazione”: if you’re interested in the issue of immigration I strongly recommend it to you because it offers a complete picture of the situation in Italy and abroad. As we all know, we could talk about it for hours, listing the different points of view, but here I’ll try to be concise and to sketch just some few points of the problem.
For many years, Italy was a country of emigrants: up to the end of the second world war millions of Italians fled from the desperate economic situation of their motherland, looking for better conditions of life in Germany, France and even overseas, in the United States. Then, in 1947 the Marshall Plan was introduced in the European countries belonging to the Western sphere of influence in order to restore their struggling economies and this provided the trigger of a new virtuous circle. In the following years, Italy entered the era of the so called “economic boom”, characterized by a large expansion of job and consumptions. As a consequence, by the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, our country (that before was merely a land of passage on the way to richer European countries) became - and still is - one of the targets of a new flow of immigration. However, this more recent phenomenon is completely different from the migratory waves of the first half of the twentieth century for at least two main reasons.
1 - The new immigrants don’t come from either our European neighbours or from the poorer regions of Italy, but from North Africa, East Europe, Asia, Latin America. This people bring with them ways of living that are completely different from ours and this often leads to a “clash of cultures” that can even become very violent when fear, prejudice and intolerance merge together.
2 - While in the past there was a predominance of “pull factors”, now the “push factors” prevail. This means that when our grandparents migrated to the United States in the interwar period they managed to find a job quite easily because countries like that had already reached the full employment and need foreign workers to fill the vacancies. In this way, little by little, those people got integrated in the new society by showing the natives that they had come to work hard and nothing more. Nowadays, Italy is very far from reaching full employment and immigrants either are employed in those sectors of the market of job that Italians reject (such as cleaning, working in factory, taking care of old people…), or they fall in the net of criminality, thus contributing to increase the hate towards foreigners in our society. Most of the times, people who get ready to leave their poor village in Senegal or in Romania know very well that life won’t be easy in Italy, but they come all the same because of the “push factors” that operate in their countries: famine, diseases, lack of job, dictatorial regimes and so on.
As you can see, the situation is not easy at all. In my dreams, a fairer judicial system punishes the foreigners who are guilty of a crime and allows those who work honestly and respect the laws of our country (who are the majority, although newspapers and Tv don’t talk about them everyday) to live in peace with the rest of the community, without being afraid that their children are beaten at school by some stupid bully. Multiculturalism IS POSSIBLE, but it must be promoted by the State and by the public institutions, otherwise another wave of racism will force us all to shut ourselves into our houses for fear of the "other".
Of course, the issue is by far more complex than what I wrote…