Some years ago, the eminent American scholar David North wondered why democratic governments, regardless of their positive purposes, could not manage to wipe off illegal immigration. The reasons were essentially three: the burden of the interests that were deriving benefit from it. The paradox of international laws that only recognize the right to emigrate and not that of immigration. Finally, the third reason is to be found in the pretension of governments to be able to control migration flows with a massive but inefficient bureaucratic system overloaded by administrative procedures and limitations. Let us have an in depth look on how things actually work. The oligarchies of the countries of origin are the actual beneficiaries of illegal immigration. They directly or indirectly make a profit from the “tolls” payed in exchange of a loosening of their keen control on illegal departures. This is a sort of false secret used and modulated by these oligarchies according to the need of the moment. Behind them there are the unscrupulous entrepreneurs of the host countries that shoddily wrong-foot legal immigrants with laws and contracts. Finally, there are those illegal immigrants that managed to cross, even if at high risk and costs, the “boundaries of the [...]

Even in the United States immigration is increasingly emerging as a thorny issue. On Saturday 18 December the US Senate rejected the Dream Act (Development, Relief, Education Alien Minors), although the same legislative proposal had been previously endorsed by the House of Representatives. The Dream Act was designed by the Obama administration to enable children of illegal immigrants to apply for a long-term visa in the circumstance that they had successfully completed high school and intended to enroll in a university or in the army. According to the bill, the “dream” (i.e. obtaining a green-card), in order to come true for thousands of willing but unlawful young immigrants, was to be subjected to three additional binding conditions:  apart from completing high school, would-be applicants should have entered the country before turning 16 and should have been residing on its soil for at least 5 years in a row; they should have had a clean criminal record; most importantly, they should have served already 2 years in the army or being enrolled for as long as 2 years in a college. The Obama proposal was thus less a far-reaching and blind amnesty – of the likes of Italian “sanatorie” –  than [...]

In Italy, it seems that somebody is determined to irritate public opinion and to make it nastier than it already is on immigration. A proof of that is the recent judgement delivered by the Supreme Court upholding the appeal of a Nigerian woman against the confirmation of the deportation order for exploitation of the prostitution of others by the Perugia court on March 2009. The Supreme Court argued that distancing the woman from her children, who, among other things, were already fostered with an Italian family, would have prejudiced the protection of minors' interests sanctioned by the New York Convention on the Rights of the Child. This argument outstepped the principle of "exceptionality" which, according to the Italian legislation, allows prohibiting the separation of children from parents, derogating from the illegal immigration legislation. A principle which makes sense and can be understood by everybody because it is dedicated to conducts which are considered “good crimes”, though they are illegal. In this case, the parents-son relationship must be protected, as much as possible. Even turning a blind eye on it. When the destiny of a minor is involved, laws must be read and interpreted by the heart, not only by the mind. A [...]

The 5th Regional Report offers an up-to-date analysis on the presence of refugees in the region of Emilia Romagna in 2009. The study combines official data from police headquarters with data from local immigration offices, voluntary associations and parishes involved. In total, asylum seekers in Emilia Romagna are about 4,500, among which 721 just in the province of Bologna. They are mostly men asking for “subsidiary protection”. The first country of origin is Eritrea, followed by Nigeria, Ivory Cost and Serbia. Moreover ,according to the report, in the three-year period 2006/2009 the number of residence permits issued by Police Headquarters increased by 73,4% .They were just 1,949 in 2006 against 365 in 2009. It is interesting to notice that, Emilia Romagna is the first Italian region which adopted, in 2004, a regional immigration law expressly designed to refugees and asylum seekers.

The infringement procedure opened by the European Commission against France is liable to turn into a dangerous infection. Simply because, contrary to what most of the press asserted, the Brussels Executive’s choice creates the conditions for the uncovering of that dangerous Pandora’s box called immigration, rather than being an appeasement with Paris. Why? That’s simple. As everybody knows, before last Wednesday, when the Commission formally started the infringement procedure only on free movement, Sarkozy’s government also faced the more hateful and defamatory infringement procedure for racial discrimination. The removal of this charge was widely seen as a “soft” solution for a dispute which was likely to overflow and slip through fingers. Which is true, especially if we consider that France apparently has not already reckoned with the stigma attached in its history by the Vichy’s government. So, is everything ok? Not at all. Considering that the choice of linking the Roma issue with the right to free movement gives room to a broad and omitted opinion according to which free movement and immigration are synonyms. A large part of the populations of what once was Western Europe, who are now in financial difficulties and frightened by a world more and [...]

The results of the Swedish elections are a new confirmation of that “Northern Europe’s disease” which Francesco Molica pointed out in the latest editorial of this journal, last Friday. This “malaise” is endangering the political stability and destabilizing the collective behaviour  of communities which have always been considered the quintessence of stability. A scenario where immigration represents, if not the only cause, then the detonator for sure. Why do, today in Sweden and yesterday in Holland, Denmark, Austria, Switzerland and Flemish Belgium, substantial segments of the population abandon their parties and vote for those parties which are called, using a gross and superficial stereotype, “populist”? the truth is that immigration is producing what the American political scientists define as a “political disconnect”: a disconnection in the real interests and in the cultural perception of the most disadvantaged social groups, which have been hardly touched by the  economic crisis, and of the national establishments. This opens the doors to political entrepreneurs, often unknown, determined to push their way through the tangle of the traditional power. The truth is that in the immigration’s DNA there is an internal contradiction, between the push to an opening-up to immigrants from the economic system and [...]

European immigration is the mother of modern immigration. For the simple reason that the huge army of men, women and children who, between 1870 and 1914, emigrated from the Old Continent, to seek their fortune Overseas, was the cause of the solution of continuity between the nature of the old migration and the contemporary one. A real leap paradigm leap in the history of humanity, represented in an emblematic way by the birth, thanks to emigration-immigration, of the first two big nations of immigrants: Unites States and Argentina. Human beings always migrated. However, with that big exodus, as it were, the terms of the problem changed and immigration became something “else” if compared to the past migration: “We must distinguish between the concept of immigration and that of migration. Immigration is when some individuals (many sometimes, but an amount that is statistically irrelevant if compared to the original stock) move from one Country to another (like the Italians and the Irish in America, or the Turks today in Germany). The phenomena of immigration can be politically controlled, limited, deterred, planned or accepted. As to migration the case is different. Either violent or peaceful, they are like natural phenomena: they occur and [...]

It is not true that immigration can sort out the demographic problem, it can at the most soften it. A type of immigration that is propelled in the long run can slow down the process of population aging and lower the relationships of dependence. Nevertheless, in order that this result is really meaningful, high levels of net immigration for long periods. In fact, on the ground of some simulations it has been calculated that Europe, only to keep unchanged the percentage of population of working-age on the total one, should quadruple its current immigration rate. As if it were not enough the other side of the world is also characterized by a low birth rate. A phenomenon that in the last years seems to advance to a more and more rapid rhythm to the point that “in some regions of India the proportion between males and females in the age groups 0-20 years is 1 to 2.”(1) “There are important differences in the expected population trends in various countries […]. Noteworthy reductions of fertility rate were registered at the beginning of the 60’s in the least developed areas. Total fertility in these regions declined: from 6 kids per woman, in 1965-1970, to 2,8 [...]

Immigration and demography are an intricate skein of problems difficult to disentangle and in which is not even easy to find one’s bearings. A brainteaser that was born from the original sin of the coarse blunder of reverend Malthus at the end of ‘700: population is necessarily limited by the amount of bread and butter available; when it is not limited by effective restraints, population increases when sustenance increase; these restraints and those that repress the largest capacity of development of the population and keep the effects within the sustenance limits, they are all reduced to the moral control, to the vice and misery. Things, as we know went in a different way: Malthus was wrong. “Technological post-war period development, in fact, allowed for the availability of food, but possibly for the lack of money to buy it […]. With the spread of wealth, I think mainly of China and India, the best contraceptive ever is spreading […]. The young couples of Beijing and Shanghai that want to live comfortably and have children later, are already got started: they are lowering the average fertility of China”.(1) So, the best contraceptive ever is the per capita income that is on the increase. With [...]

Immigration lives of and for remittances. The analysis of the enormous, growing flow of money, that workers send from abroad to their relatives of the homeland, helps clearing up many of the mechanisms that characterizes the migration phenomenon. The latest available figures show that the total amount of financial transfers, registered in 2009, is equal to $ 316 billions (World Bank) with an increase of 99% if compared to the ones occurred in 2002. To these figures they also must be added those transfers occurred through “informal” channels, that are valued between $ 50 and 100 billions. A real “finance of the other world” that already represents the second international business and monetary flow immediately after oil exports, and with regard to those remittances that were tracked, they represent more than the double of the global development aids. The point is that: remittances normally reduce poverty and modify income distribution. One only need reflect on the fact that, according to a study by “Financial Times”, the percentage of world population with an annual income that is inferior to $ 1.000 has declined from 50% of the 70’ to 17% of 2000. By 2015 it might reduce to 6%. However, the extension and [...]