Immigration is a taboo. What is a taboo? A fact about which you cannot talk or about which you always have to give the same interpretation. The taboo demands that it is perpetuated with meaningless phrases that have, as their only objective, the strengthening of the taboo itself. To Infringe the taboo is considered repugnant and worthy of censure from the community. A taboo is nourished by noble pronouncements like: “Let’s remember when it was us who crossed the seas, often in really difficult conditions and let’s put a brake on the excesses of reaction in relation to those people who are coming to seek a future in Italy.” pronounced in a way that is “differently responsible” by Giorgio Napolitano. The United States, the land of immigration for Italians above all after the annexation of the South and of the Veneto region by the Savoys, was an immense unpopulated space, with incredible natural wealth and to go there you first had to ask permission. If you got off the boat without authorisation at Boston or Miami they shot at you. The world has changed. Making comparisons with the past serves only to keep a taboo alive. Today’s Italy is over-populated. It’s one of the most densely populated states in the world. France has double the land area, with few mountainous areas and about the same number of inhabitants. Maine, one of the tiniest States in America, has the dimensions of the North of Italy with only 1,230,000 inhabitants.
The Italy of the spieler Berlusconi who promised houses and work for immigrants on Tunisian TV, has 20% unemployment and at least 100,000 unemployed people from outside the European Community and that number will double after the widely forecast collapse of the property market. Where will we put them? With which resources will we manage them? Will we give them a home and a job? Will D'Alema make them welcome on his yacht Ikarus or will they be rubbing shoulders with our “vulnerable”, the pensioners and unemployed people of the suburbs? We don’t manage to do anything for the people of L’Aquila and we are deluding ourselves that we are feeding the planet?
The immigration taboo has undesirable effects and desirable ones too. The undesirable ones are in front of everyone’s eyes, with thousands of poor wretches left to their own resources and to the mafias. The desirable ones are the provision of low cost labour, often on the black market, often destined to die on the job for the profit of their little boss and that of the Confindustria. The triumph of the globalisation of slaves. Political refugees must always find a welcome. Those who come from war zones must always find a welcome. The others are welcome only if there are the conditions to receive them, a home and a job, otherwise there’s electoral demagogy to the benefit not of our goody-goody and good-for-nothing left wingers, but to the benefit of the Lega. An invasion, because it’s a matter of invasion, will give the Lega absolute control of the North of Italy. In recent years the Lega has fed on immigration. Every immigrant without proper credentials means an extra vote. The destabilisation of the States has always happened even thanks to the immigration factor. The Lega is the party with the most interest in keeping alive the taboo of the unresourced welcome, justified by the myth of the Italian with a cardboard suitcase. The problem of the Lega and of immigration that feeds it is not just an Italian issue, but European. Fascism was not just an Italian issue, and neither will the Lega be. But Europe is having a blessed sleep and as we have seen in Libya, in reality it doesn’t exist. Which union of States can continue to exist without a foreign policy and a common army? And which State can allow itself to have the immigration taboo without disintegrating?