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Perché sto studiando questo soggetto:

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The refugee crisis led to a growth in anti-immigrant sentiment, which increased the popularity of non-traditional far-right parties like La Lega Nord and Cinque Stelle. There had already been an immigration issue for years, but the Syrian Civil War meant that the number of refugees was overwhelming. Frustratingly for Italy, the EU provided very little support for the efforts to rescue refugees from the ocean, so that operation had to be abandoned. Due to risky, poor political decisions from the heads of the government at this time, the March 2018 election favored the far-right populist parties.

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Giuseppe Nangeroni Professor of Geography, Catholic University of Milan. Author of Geografia e geomorfologia.

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Italy - Migration, Populism, Crisis | Britannica

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Italy - Migration, Populism, Crisis: Renzi immediately embarked on a bold reform program in an attempt to revitalize Italy’s stagnant labour market and to stimulate economic growth. While the IMF applauded the move, Renzi faced opposition from Italy’s labour unions as well as from members of his own party. Italy’s economy emerged from recession in 2015, but it still lagged behind the rest of the euro area, and unemployment remained stubbornly high. Meanwhile, Europe’s migrant crisis continued to loom as a pressing foreign and domestic issue for Renzi’s administration. Thousands of refugees died attempting the hazardous Mediterranean crossing in barely seaworthy craft, and Italy’s Operation

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Italy has become much more culturally diverse in recent years due to the influx of migrants. Muslim migrants specifically face resistance from Italians fearing Islamist radicals. They initially managed to wear down that resistance through community outreach and service, but as the migrants kept coming and Islamic terrorist attacks occurred in other European countries, that trend reversed. Although some people are entirely against immigration for xenophobic or Islamophobic reasons, others simply believe that Italy cannot take all of these immigrants, and that the EU has left them high and dry, with no assistance.

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Whizzing mopeds, chiming church bells, vibrant piazzas and bustling cafes. Quintessential images of Italy as many of us believe it to be.

But walk through Rome's Piazza Vittorio these days and you could be forgiven for believing you were in London.

You hear Arabic here and Punjabi there. Romanian, Chinese and Afghan voices fill the air.

Cheap Korean, Indian and Egyptian eateries try to entice you with flashing neon signs.

Multicultural Italy is a relatively new phenomenon but it's a growing one.

Syrian restaurant owner Mohidyn Oudstwani tells me that conquering Italian hearts and palates is easier than you might think.

Syrians and Italians have much in common, he says. Both spend much of their time eating or talking about good food, and the lives of both peoples revolve around their "mamas".

But co-existence - coesistenza as it is known here - is delicate and hard-won.

When Imam Sami Salem, originally from Egypt and now a well-known figure across Italy - founded a mosque in a graffiti-covered, working-class district of Rome 20 years ago, Italian neighbours pelted the congregation with tomatoes, cigarette butts and dirty water.

But Imam Salem decided to fight prejudice with openness. He threw open the doors to his mosque and became involved in local charities and community work.

One of the reasons Italy has fewer Islamist radicals than many other European countries, he believes, is because it doesn't have ghettos or isolated Muslim neighbourhoods like France's banlieues.

Familiarity breeds tolerance, says Imam Salem.

But Italian tolerance is now thinning, following the jihadist attacks in Brussels and Paris, combined with Italian fears over the influx of migrants arriving in Italy via north Africa.

Three hundred thousand new arrivals are expected here this year, most crossing in dinghies from Libya.

But smugglers are increasingly heading to Italy from Egypt too and, with the Balkan route from Greece now firmly shut to migrants, there's talk of the desperate trying to access Italy after crossing mountain paths in Albania.

Italians feel under siege. There is talk here of a looming national crisis.

"Of course we are worried," says Italy's Finance Minister Pier Carlo Padoan.

"We are worried first of all from a humanitarian point of view, from a security point of view, and then of course from a financial point of view. The cost of migration has been substantial."

Mr Padoan complains that the EU left Italy alone with its migration crisis for too long.

He points out that Italy was faced with mass arrivals long before Greece and that the EU refused to acknowledge until recently that Italy's coastal borders were in fact Europe's common southern flank.

Now he is calling for a common EU migration strategy and a common EU migration fund to help front-line countries like Italy.

In the meantime he wants more flexibility in eurozone financial rules, to compensate for the losses Italy has suffered due to mass migration.

The country's finance minister has been struggling to speed up growth after a record long recession. Italy's public debt measured against GDP is the biggest in the eurozone after Greece.

Italians feel that the EU owes them.

A strong air of resentment began to waft down the corridors of power in Rome as soon as the EU signed an agreement with Turkey to deter migrants from trying to reach Greece.

The man dubbed Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's "Mr Brussels" believes the EU has to commit itself to a new relationship with Africa, to help deter migrants trying to reach Italy.

Sandro Gozi, Italy's Secretary for European Affairs, told me that in the long term there had to be less incentive for people to risk everything to come here to Europe. But in the shorter term, a cash deal had to be drawn up with North African countries similar to the EU-Turkey agreement.

Turkey has now been offered up to €6bn (£4.75bn; $6.8bn) by the EU to stop migrants coming to Greece.

Italy says the total of €1.8bn so far put forward by the EU for the whole of Africa is laughable.

What Italy is keen for is the EU to push for bilateral deals with African countries, to make it easier to send economic migrants and failed asylum seekers back home.

For the moment, most migrants choosing the people-smugglers' route to Europe via Italy come from sub-Saharan Africa.

But Syrians and others refugees are now expected here too, with other routes to Europe closed.

Gianluca Pini, an MP whose increasingly popular opposition Northern League party is widely associated with anti-immigration sentiment, told me simply that Italy was full.

Italy has no more money, no more space, no more facilities to help these people, he insists.

Like Greece, Italy is a gatekeeper to Europe along its southern shoreline.

Like Greece, Italy in the past waved migrants onwards and northwards towards richer neighbours.

But with northern borders now firmly shut, migrants still streaming in and difficulties deporting even failed asylum seekers back home, Italy says it is not waving, but drowning.

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Migration crisis: Italy threatened by national crisis

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Whizzing mopeds, chiming church bells, vibrant piazzas and bustling cafes. Quintessential images of Italy as many of us believe it to be. But walk through Rome's Piazza Vittorio these days and you could be forgiven for believing you were in London. You hear Arabic here and Punjabi there.

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In questo articolo, la giornalista scrive sui profughi e le città e i paesi in cui loro abitano adesso. Alcuni dei paesi vogliono i profughi e sono molti socievoli, perché la popolazione è troppa piccola. Gli immigrati sono un terzo della popolazione di un paesino, Riace, dove il sindaco gli sta chiedendo di venire. Molti profughi prendono i posti dove gli italiani giovani partono, e quindi ci sono molti agricoltori chi sono profughi. L’articolo dice che i profughi non piacciono a alcuni paesi, e il paese Gorino blocca alcune profughe, ma dice che generalmente gli piace alle città. È difficile per i profughi imparare la lingua, ma sono felice di essere sicuri. Questo articolo è ottimista per i profughi, ma sa che le loro vite sono difficili.

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From the kitchen of their new apartment, Mohammed Ali and Kinda Nonoo watched their children run across a rooftop terrace with a view of the rolling green hills of southern Italy. They could see a shining sliver of the Mediterranean Sea, four miles away.

The tranquility of the scene was a marked change from war-torn Aleppo, Syria, which Ali and his family had fled nearly five years ago, and the chaotic situation they had found in Lebanon afterward.

And unlike in Lebanon, where the estimated 1.5 million Syrian refugees were seen as pulling jobs away from the local population, leaders in this Italian community were pinning their hopes on the refugees helping to rebuild its economy.

The family from Aleppo had landed in the southern province of Reggio Calabria, an area that young Italians have largely abandoned in search of better economic opportunities in the north and abroad, leaving behind shuttered schools and fallow fields. In the four-story building the Syrian family now occupied, the two floors below were empty.

Over the last decade, a flood of migrants and refugees have begun to replace the Italians who left. From 2008 to 2013, the percentage of foreign migrant workers in the Italian farm industry nearly doubled to 37% from 19%, according to the National Institute of Agricultural Economics.

The town of Riace, where Ali and his family settled when they first arrived in Italy, has garnered international attention in recent years for making a deliberate effort to attract migrants from around the world. Immigrants from more than 20 countries now make up one-third of the town's population of 1,500, said Mayor Domenico Lucano.

A safer journey

The transition, for some, has not been easy.

The Syrian couple and their five children arrived in Italy in late February via the "humanitarian corridors" program launched a year ago by a pair of nongovernmental organizations affiliated with the Catholic Church and a coalition of Protestant churches.

The project, funded by the money Italian citizens divert from their taxes to the churches, has brought about 800 Syrian refugees from Lebanon to communities throughout Italy since February 2016. It will bring 200 more refugees from Lebanon and possibly Morocco, along with about 500 Africans now living in Ethiopia.

Many new arrivals cross the Mediterranean on smuggler boats - and many more don't make it. Last year, more than 5,000 people died in the Mediterranean, according to the United Nations refugee agency. The main aim of the new humanitarian corridors project was to prevent refugees from attempting the dangerous sea crossing, said Paolo Naso of the Federation of Protestant Churches in Italy, one of the architects of the program.

(Abby Sewell / For The Times)

Under the new initiative, the church organizations fly the refugees to Rome and take them to their new homes in communities around the country.

Naso and others hope, in part, that a new generation of workers from abroad could help replace the nation's shrinking workforce if they can be integrated into Italian society. "Our population is aging and declining and the decay is very severe, especially in the rural areas," he said.

Italy has taken in fewer than 1,000 refugees through the official U.N. resettlement program since 2015, but has seen much larger numbers arriving in smuggler boats.

The arrivals have been met with some surges of anti-immigrant sentiment. Last year, residents of the central town of Gorino put up barricades to block the arrival of a small group of refugee women. But migrants and refugees have also had an influential defender in Pope Francis, who has brought a few Syrian refugees to the Vatican and urged Catholic parishes to take in more.

In Riace, the migrants come from sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and, now, Syria. Immigrants herd sheep in the rolling hills surrounding the town, drive tractors on the winding road leading up to it, sweep the streets in the town square and work alongside Italian residents in the handful of artisan shops in the town's center.

A 'humane alternative'

The push to welcome migrants earned Lucano, the mayor, a spot on Fortune magazine's list of the world's 50 greatest leaders last year.

(Abby Sewell / For The Times)

"We are basically proposing a humane alternative," the mayor said in an interview at Riace's City Hall. "This is the message we are sending to this world where closures and barriers are prevailing."

On a recent afternoon, Gabriel Effah, a Ghanaian who came in a smuggler's boat from Libya eight months ago, sat on a bench outside the town's park chatting with a friend as a gaggle of newly arrived African teenagers passed by on the road leading into the town's center.

"Bambinos," Effah said, using his new Italian. "Every day people come."

Stella Awini, 30, also from Ghana, left her young son with relatives and made the sea journey three years ago. After the boat landed on the island of Lampedusa, police brought her to Riace. When she first arrived, she swept the streets, then helped supervise children in the local school until it closed because of a lack of enrollment. Now she cooks for unaccompanied minors living in a group home.

"The life in Riace is very good for me," she said. "They take immigrants as their own, as Italian people."

About 100 of the migrants in Riace have settled as long-term residents, Lucano said. Others, like the newly arrived Syrian families, find the situation less welcoming and move on.

(Abby Sewell / For The Times)

Tears of happiness

When Ali and Nonoo unloaded their luggage at the airport in Beirut in preparation for their flight to Italy, their 15-year-old daughter, Mais, broke down in tears of happiness and relief.

In Aleppo, Mais had watched her aunt - Ali's sister - and five cousins die in an airstrike below the family's apartment.

Ali and his family fled to Lebanon, where they escaped the bombs, but not all violence. Mais' brother Ali, a plump and cheerful 14-year-old, bears a scar below one knee from a knife attack by a group of older boys. The young men were affiliated with Hezbollah, the Shiite Muslim political party and militia that supports Syrian President Bashar Assad and sees the refugees as enemies, Nonoo said.

"There was no security there, never, never," she said. "Even if we wanted to go out to see the doctor, we tried to make sure no one would see us. Here, the first thing that has improved is that there is security."

But in other ways, the transition has been difficult. In Riace, few of the other immigrants spoke Arabic, and the family didn't get along with the two Ethiopians who served as interpreters and go-betweens with the local authorities.

After a month in Riace, Ali and his family asked to be relocated to a nearby town, Gioiosa Ionica, where they joined another Syrian family.

Gioiosa Ionica has a smaller immigrant population - about 100 among 7,000 inhabitants - but some local leaders are hoping to attract more.

Maurizio Zavaglia, president of the town council, hopes the Syrian families and other migrants will help revive the local farming industry and bring in tourists looking for a quiet retreat amid vineyards and olive groves.

"Before, the people who came here stayed for just a little time because after a while they saw the condition of this area, that we are not very rich, there is a high rate of unemployment," he said. "After a while they went, some to Germany, Switzerland, all over. The challenge with these families is to give them a sense of stability and a longer permanency."

'My head is hurting'

In Gioiosa Ionica, Ali and Nonoo said, the people were kind, but the family still felt isolated, and the language barrier became an additional problem as Mais was suffering from a perplexing medical issue. In Riace, she had begun to complain of persistent severe headaches and dizziness. Eventually, the family was able to get her to a hospital, where a doctor gave her medication. It didn't help.

A week after the move to Gioiosa Ionica, Mais collapsed in the hallway one afternoon, screaming, "My head is hurting me!" Zavaglia and an Italian friend happened to be present. The Italians called paramedics, who took the girl to a hospital in another town.

The family came home several hours later with a referral to another hospital and no answer to what was causing the problem.

The next day, with the children playing on the terrace after dinner, Ali and Nonoo talked anxiously about the difficulty of accessing medical care in the remote area and in another language, and about the prospects of finding work that would sustain them once they stop receiving the small amount of aid they were getting via the program.

In Syria, Ali had run a restaurant and bakery. He hoped to do the same in Italy, but without enough money or a grasp of Italian, the prospect seemed far-fetched.

"We can work, but without the language it's difficult," Nonoo said. "We love Italy and the Italian people and the language, but if they give us low wages, I don't know."

Could they go to Canada instead? Ali asked. Or Germany?

But the children were happy with their new home. In Lebanon, they hadn't gone to school for most of the last five years. Now after a few weeks of Italian lessons, they had learned to rattle off numbers, months, names of fruits and vegetables and were excited to start attending the local public school.

"It's much better here," said Ali, the couple's son. "Here, there is hope."

A Moroccan man passing by as the boy and one of his younger sisters stood outside a neighbor's house one afternoon stopped and asked in Arabic, "Are you Arab?"

Yes, Ali told him, from Syria.

"Thank God for your safety," the man said, and smiled as he continued down the otherwise empty street.
Sewell is a special correspondent. ALSO Here's one way of fighting terrorism that the U.S. may be rethinking under Trump These Syrians were finally being evacuated to safety. That's when the bomb went off Italy offers a glimpse of the international concern over violent extremism in prisons

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italy syria lebanon refugees migrants economy riace

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A small town in Italy was losing population. Now Syrian refugees are key to its survival

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From the kitchen of their new apartment, Mohammed Ali and Kinda Nonoo watched their children run across a rooftop terrace with a view of the rolling green hills of southern Italy. They could see a shining sliver of the Mediterranean Sea, four miles away.