Italy raises the stakes on immigration

The European Union has so many problem children these days that you have to wonder if there are any actual grown-ups left in the room.

At the root of the problem is one common factor: immigration. This week it is the turn of Italy, which feels it has been left alone to handle the tide of immigrants from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa that has washed up on its shores in recent years. Its new populist government has responded by denying its ports to all undocumented arrivals and making it harder for asylum-seekers to process their claims.

In Germany, the long decline of Angela Merkel and the rise of the Far-Right AFD has led to tensions within the governing coalition and a growing conviction among voters that the admission in 2015 of one million Muslim refugees and others, mainly from Syria and Iraq, was a mistake that must never be repeated.

Further East, the four Visegrad countries, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, have meanwhile maintained their brick-wall refusal to take any non-Christian immigrants against a steady stream of vituperation from Brussels. The breach that has opened up between the Visegrad quartet, tacitly supported by Austria, and the Big Two of Germany and France, backed by the Commission, shows no signs of closing. Threats of economic sanctions have been ignored by governments that feel sure of their own people’s support and the rightness of their cause.

In the UK, more than two years on from the referendum, Leave advocates like to pretend that opposition to the EU was all about trade, disregard for the unelected Commission and the people’s rejection of the European Court of Justice.

But this was never true. And they know it.

Leave won, and Remain lost, because millions of ordinary Britons thought their country was being swamped by foreigners. They didn’t vote to stay in or out of the Single Market or the Customs Union. They didn’t give a stuff about the court. They voted as they did because they wanted the Government to take control of the country’s borders and enforce a sharp redution in the number of Poles, Romanians and others living and working in the UK.

That is the long and the short of it. For some, the false prospect of billions more for the NHS was a bonus, even a clincher. But it was immigration that turned the tide.

In Italy, where the populist coalition of La Lega and the Five-Star Movement (M5S) has been in power since June 1, the ire of the people is directed not at citizens of other EU member states – which would be difficult given that Italy has long been a net-contributor in this field – but at migrants from the developing world, most of them young men, who set off in overcrowded boats from Libya, often drowning in the attempt.

Italy doesn’t want them, and it resents the fact that France and Germany offer little but fine words in support.

This week, interior minister Matteo Salvini, the Lega leader, not only defended his recent decision not to allow immigrant boats from Libya to land in Italy, but went on to channel the wartime Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, tweeting tanti nemici, tanto onore, (so many enemies, so much honor), a not-so-subtle variation on the late dictator’s dictum, molti nemici, molto onore, (many enemies, much honor). The fact that he did so on the Duce’s birthday did not go unnoticed. For Salvini, like his Five-Star colleague Luigi Di Maio, is part of an Italy First government, supported by the octogenerian billionaire Silvio Berlusconi, that wants to purge Italy of unwanted bloodstock and encourage instead a boom in native births.

In 1927, Mussolini called on Italians to join him in a population drive – the Battle for Births – aimed at increasing the population from 40 million to 60 million, with an ideal of 12 children per family. Tax incentives and an absolute ban on contraception and abortion were supposed to do the job, but in fact the population rose only gradually, and in recent decades has decreased at a worrying rate.

Meanwhile, there are at present an estimated 5.1 million foreign-born residents in Italy, most of them Muslim, Sub-Saharan African or Roma. Several millions more have an immigrant background, and the fear among Italians is that, over time, they will end up a minority in their own country.

Similar fears exist in the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden.

Salvini may, like the Duce, find it hard to convince Italians to have larger families. Even allowing for the much-higher birthrate among immigrants, the population is falling by some 100,000 a year, causing the average age for the first time ever to exceed 45. But if he can reverse the trend even slightly while at the same time cutting back significantly on the flood of immigrants, he will, without question, have earned the gratitude of the great majority of his native-born electorate. 

Italy’s tradition – “our story, our identity,” was at stake, he said this week, ignored by the Left which, supported by big business, used the ongoing fertility crisis as an excuse to import foreign workers. 

The fear, of course, is that with nativism comes racism, and there have been a number of incidents recently, including an attack on a female athlete of African origin, that suggest a growing sense of impunity among more extreme anti-immigrant groups.

According to former prime minister Matteo Renzi, of the Democratic Left, attacks on people of a different skin colour have created nothing less than an emergency. “This is now obvious,” he tweeted. “Nobody can deny it, especially if they sit in government.”

Salvini claims that he will stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone from an ethnic minority background who has been treated unjustly. But he shows no sign of relenting on his central theme. At the same time, he has taken to mocking his fellow Europeans for their refusal, as he sees it, to help Italy carry the burden of immigration from across the Mediterranean. He is particularly scornful of President Emmanuel Macron, who has on a number of occasions called on EU member states to take up the challenge while never actually welcoming more than a handful of boat people to France. But Salvini also has hard words for Mrs Merkel, and even for Pedro Sanchez, the Spanish premier, who made something of a show of taking in a couple of boatloads in June, but has done little since.

As the British seek to pull up the drawbridge at Dover, having thus far seen off threats by France to open Calais to the thousands of Third World migrants intent on reaching England, other bridges are falling into place across Europe. The Schengen agreement that provides for open borders across most of the Continent is looking increasingly fragile as Fortress Europe gives way to Fortress France, Fortress Germany and, now, Fortress Italy.

Ten years ago, it was the near-collapse of the single currency that most obviously threatened the EU. Then it was Brexit. Now it is immigration. Free movement, it seems is a splendid idea, just as long as it doesn’t mean too many strangers from foreign lands trying to make their homes in countries other than their own.