What about immigration in Italy?

I think that this is a hot topic to talk about, especially here in the north of Italy where the problem is particulary felt as important.

First of all I would like to say that immigration does not only mean "poor people arriving with ships in Lampedusa" but it is a phenomenon which occurs also with reference to many other kinds of people coming to our country for different reasons.

However, it undeniably true that most of the times immigration involves people from poor countries moving to other countries which are supposed to be wealthier. I would like to underline the fact that, for instance, as far as Italy is concerned, it is "supposed to be" wealthier because of the fact that, at the moment, it is not a particularly wealth country, so that immigrants may find it more difficult to integrate into our society.

Having a look to the data provided by the Istat as regards immigration in Europe and in Italy in the last few years, you can see that Europe has welcomed 34% of the whole worldwide immigrants, whereas North American has received just 23% of them. This is an interesting thing, particularly if we consider the size of the two continents. Moreover, in the last few years immigration has provided 89% of the whole European demographic grown, which is also an important matter to take into consideration.

As far as Italy is concerned, at the beginning of 2006 the number of immigrants in our country was of almost 3 million people. Most of these immigrants come from a few number of foreign countries, such as Albania, Morocco, Romania, Ucraina and China. Another important thing is that nowadays the number of clandestine immigrants coming in Italy crossing the sea with ships is much lower than in the 90s.

These are just a few data to see how the phenomen is developing nowadays in Europe and in Italy; however, I think that in each Italian reagion there are different approaches and different problems concerning immigration. Living in the Veneto region, for instance, we do not have problems concerning clandestine ships or whatever similar, but we are literally invaded by a huge number of people coming from Romania, and as far as I'm concerned, I feel this may turn into a problem for the population because of the fact that some areas of the city can be actually be perceived as "Rumanian colonies". Moreover, we're also facing a lot of problems because of the racquet ruled by illegal immigrants, so that our cities aren't safe anymore.

I know some of the things I've just written down here can be considered as commonplaces, and in fact they are, but actually I cannot even say that those problems do not exist: I would be hypocrite.

There would be also the religion problem to discuss...but it is such a ticklish topic that it requires an overall analysis which I'm not going to do here.

Camilla