• by Matt Carr (bologna, italy)
• Sunday, March 13, 2011
• Inter Press Service

The momentous political events in North Africa have been accompanied by increasingly apocalyptic warnings from the Italian government of a mass influx of unwanted immigration from Tunisia and Libya.

This focus on real and potential immigration has tended to obscure the ongoing struggle for the civil and political rights of immigrants inside Italy. In the last two decades non-EU migrants have come to play a crucial economic role in a society that often prefers to ignore and marginalise them.

These contradictions are particularly glaring in the Lombard province of Brescia. With its elegant Renaissance porticos and creamy stone palazzos, its statues, museums, and sculptures, Brescia embodies the historical and cultural riches that attract so many tourists to the Italian north.

But the province of Brescia is also home to some 200,000 non-EU immigrants, who constitute some 16 percent of the city’s population — the highest percentage of any Italian city. Most migrants live in the modern periphery of the city, working in the small and medium sized factories that once formed the base of Italy’s new found economic prosperity.

Others work in construction and agriculture, or as domestic servants and carers for the elderly — jobs which before the recent economic crisis were seen by many Italians as beneath them.

Many migrants have residence permits as a result of the Italian government’s periodic amnesties for undocumented workers, but some employers prefer to hire workers off the books who can be paid less and fired more easily. Both regularised and irregular migrants in Brescia often find themselves in circumstances that are no less precarious than their more publicised counterparts in the mafia-dominated agricultural sector in the southern mezzogiorno.

Undocumented migrants face the constant possibility of police identity checks and deportation. Since residence permits are dependent on the possession of a work contract, even legalised migrants can slip into irregularity if they become unemployed for more than six months.

Nadeem Hussain arrived in Italy from Pakistan in 1996 on a boat from Greece as a 17-year-old teenager with no papers and no knowledge of Italian. Today he has a residence permit and runs a kebab and pizza takeaway in the town of Gavardo, near Lake Garda, where he also works as a trade union official.

Nadeem has a wife and his two children were born in Italy. After fifteen years he cannot vote, and could theoretically be deported to his native country if his business went under. 'I feel part of Italian society, but Italian society doesn’t feel the same way about me,' he says.

'If I had to go back to Pakistan, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.'

This sense of being in Italy but not part of it is exacerbated by the xenophobic anti-immigrant politics of Umberto Bossi’s separatist Northern League. In the 2009 elections the League wrested control of the Brescia city council from the bookish mayor Paolo Corsini. A Catholic intellectual with communist convictions, Corsini was a strong advocate of integration, whose administration was undermined by a ruthlessly xenophobic campaign which blamed the city’s immigrants for crime and unemployment.

Since then Northern League councils have enacted a series of discriminatory anti-immigrant ordinances across the province. The tone was set in December 2009, when the Coccaglio town council ordered undocumented migrants to be excluded from public places throughout the festive season, in what its progenitors unashamedly called ‘Operation White Christmas’.

Other Northern League towns have banned immigrants from speaking their own language in public places and compiled lists of houses where immigrants live for regular sanitary inspections. Last year the Gavardo town council removed benches from public squares where immigrants congregated and banned gatherings of more than three people.

In September the mayor of the town of Adro ordered the League’s ‘Alpine sun’ logo plastered all over a local school, and stipulated that pork should be a compulsory ingredient of school lunches - a measure that was specifically aimed at the school’s Muslim children.

The Northern League is not oblivious to the economic importance of migrants in the Italian economy — many of its supporters have no problem about employing migrant labour but they nevertheless have no desire to accept migrants as equal members of Italian society.

Some of these ordinances have been blocked by the Italian courts, but others still remain. In Gavardo a local ‘bench committee’ made up of migrants and local residents is petitioning to overturn the Lega’s removal of public benches. Some of Brescia’s immigrants have resorted to more drastic measures to make their voices heard. Last December, five undocumented migrants climbed a crane above the new light railway line in the city of Brescia in protest at their continued irregular position.

All of the migrants had paid 500 euros to the state in an attempt to take advantage of the Italian government’s last amnesty in 2009. Some had been fleeced of up to 3,5000 euros by unscrupulous middlemen who promised them work contracts that never materialised. For 17 days they lived and slept on the crane in an audacious protest that divided public opinion in Brescia and transfixed Italian society.

Hundreds of migrants, and Italians including trade unionists, anti-racist activists and representatives of more than 40 Catholic associations, provided food and water to the migrants, transforming the phrase ‘siamo tutti sulla gru’ — we are all on the crane — into the slogan of a new movement of migrant solidarity and resistance.

'It was a very risky protest,' says anti-racist activist Louise Bonzoni. 'It came close to becoming Italians versus foreigners. Some people were very much against it, but many citizens supported it.'

That movement has not disappeared. On March 1 some 200 migrants participated in the national ‘day without immigrants’ protest in the Piazza della Loggia, the traditional centre for public gatherings in the city. Developed for the first time last year by a group of Italian activists and migrants, this innovative protest is intended to demonstrate the contribution of Italy’s migrants to Italian society through strikes in the workplace and a withdrawal from other spheres of activity, such as shopping and consumption, telephone calls and even sending children to school.

The demonstration in the Piazza della Loggia fell a long way short of the 10,000 people who filled the square last year. One of those who participated was a young Pakistani named Haroun, one of the five migrants who climbed the crane. Haroun and his comrades had been persuaded to come down by the promise that the government would examine their demands.

More than three months later, none of them have received their papers. For Haroun — and for so many of Italy’s migrants — the struggle for civil and political rights is not a choice, but a practical necessity.

'We don’t have an army or anything to protest with,' he says. 'We only have our words, and we will never stop until we get our rights. If they don’t given give us our rights, then we’ll go up the crane again.'

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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