The flows decree reached the end of the line

We should be grateful to the director of Caritas of Veneto region, don Dino Pistolato, for his courageous “no” to the government decree on the entry of 100 thousand new immigrants in Italy this year. Because he said out loud what many people think to themselves. With an economic crisis which shows no improvements, the worst unemployment levels in decades and the incomes which are left at the post, also for the luckiest, it is really difficult for our alarmed public opinion to convince itself that we need new foreign manpower. Only a totally self-referential bureaucracy, faraway from reality, can pretend not to see the problem, continuing, as it has been doing for twenty years, the annual raffle of the immigrants who are necessary for the market.

The truth is that, as the endless and unique chain of regularizations promoted by the Italian government, thinking to rule immigration by means of annual quotas not only is politically risky, but also operatively ineffective. Because it increases the already critical level of social alarm and, at the same time, is not able to bridle the insatiable voracity of new workforce from companies and families. Like any other phenomenon regulated by the “invisible hand of the market”, immigration has the characteristics of a mutant. That is why it is so difficult to rule. But, if it is true that nobody and nowhere in the world seem to have the recipe, it is also true that the sooner the annual flows system will be abandoned the better. What’s the aim? For the time being, to sit down and start thinking about it again. Because the increasing tensions linked to this phenomenon almost everywhere seem to suggest to immigration policies not to deal with new immigrants only; but to widen the horizons of their competences and to talk to those who are already there as well, and who often are in serious troubles. Providing them, for instance, financial aid and professional requalification support, and reassuring the economically and culturally weakest social groups.

P.S. West pages are open to anyone who want to join in the debate on this matter.

(Translation: Francesca Cannino)