It’s a historical and demographic fact that human (and animal) populations are constantly on the move for four main reasons:
- The need to find food (for both humans and animals) or the need to find money to buy food (for humans). Examples of these are the great emigrations to the New World in the past two centuries from Europe.
- The escape from invading forces. Examples include current wars in many parts of the world today, particularly in Africa and the Middle East.
- The hope to better one’s life-style. Examples of these include people from England moving to live in Italy and, obversely, people from Italy fully able to use their qualifications and skills in better-paid jobs.
- Climate change causing, for example, inland seas to dry up and islands to be submerged.
The difference between these reasons today and in the past is the increase of the world population and the sheer scale of the movements. The world population in 1804 was one billion. The world population today is seven and a half billion with an almost exponential rise annually.
Unfortunately, all these reasons for moving today are being increasingly controlled by criminal organizations. Now the best ways of making money, apart from the usual ones of profitable financial transactions or finding a gold mine, are (in no particular order), arms sales, drug dealing and people trafficking.
All three methods kill in varying degrees. Arms murder instantly, drugs do so more gradually, people-trafficking drowns regularly. Last year, for example, five thousand people on the move were lost in the Mediterranean alone. It’s no wonder that Italian news refers to the ‘cimitero Del Mediterraneo’ – the Mediterranean graveyard – in despite of travel agents who would rather have described the area as ‘Europe’s sunny holiday playground’ (which, undoubtedly it also can be.)
The sheer size of the movements across the Med to Italy is astounding. By the end of last month over sixty thousand ‘boat people’ had travelled to land in various Italian ports this year alone, usually with the help either of the Italian navy who, magnificently carries out its marine code of saving people overboard, or NGO’s, financed by non-government funds. That’s more people than live in Gravesend or Royal Tunbridge Wells for example!
Yesterday alone, there were five thousand emigrants (of those who survived) landing on Italian shores. Supposing that this figure lands daily, that would make a total of just fewer than two million people a year. There is only one Italian city with more than two million people and that is Rome with a population of just under three million. Milan doesn’t even reach a million and a half!
Pleas from the Italian President and Prime Minister to the rest of Europe yesterday stating that Italy has reached breaking point with regard to being able to receive, clothe, house, feed and medically care for this biblical proportion are now being heard with anxiety by more people regardless of whether they are labelled as do-gooders, or racists, or populists or communists or radicals or humanitarians or just plain ostriches.
The Italian government is attempting to bring some management to the situation through the following measures:
- Allowing only ships of the Italian navy to disembark migrants and refusing entry to N. G. O ships.
- Attempting to dissuade emigrants from coming to a country which has one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe, an unpromising annual economic growth rate and an infrastructure which has been greatly damaged by last year’s disastrous sequence of earthquakes which has left so many of its people still living in tents.
- Trying to find a solution, now that the Balkan corridor of migrant entry has all but closed and when other Mediterranean countries, like Malta, are refusing entry point-blank to those coming largely from chaotic Libya.
The migrants have spent a fortune to get unscrupulous people-traffickers to take them to Europe’s ‘promised’ lands and have done so at the highest risk to their own lives. They have left countries where they were born, where they speak the language, know the culture, have their friends and relatives and where, presumably they still have assets like land and houses.
In a far smaller, and hopefully less scrupulous manner, glossy ‘Under the Abruzzi sun’ books and enticing exhibitions like ‘La Dolce Vita’, plus the usual spate of TV programmes showing one how to pick and do up a palazzo in vine-drenched Chiantishire, have conned many brits into selling their house in, e.g. Droitwich, and move to such places as Bagni di Lucca. (Both are spa towns, incidentally).
Of course, one should never sell one’s property in the UK just for the privilege of moving to Italy. Houses there, despite the brexit fiasco, still remain an investment. In Italy they are often quickly turned into an albatross round one’s neck. Property doesn’t work that way here. If anything prices have fallen….
So far the Italian government has coped with the ‘accoglienza’, or reception, of the huddled masses from Africa, the Middle East and even Pakistan by farming them out through a quota system to the different comuni in Italy. Thus an Ibo or a Madinka could find themselves either in the rust-belt suburb of a north Italian city or in some remote Apennine village. Sometimes things work out well. The Sikh farmers of Emilia-Romagna have saved the dairy industry in those parts and there are many praiseworthy stories of migrants redeeming dying parts of the Italian countrywide.
However, in Bagni di Lucca things haven’t always turned out that well and the recent pages of Facebook dealing with this part of the world are worrying rather than alarmist, concerned rather than racist, realistic rather than idealistic, about the extra number of migrants Bagni di Lucca is having to accommodate under the quota system. Already around forty African men are to be accommodated in the ex-holiday home of Pio X just by the spa.
The population of Bagni di Lucca’s ‘extracomunitari’ (i. e. those coming from outside the EU has doubled since I came here in 2005 to become over a tenth of the population of 6,500. Presumably, if brexit takes place the British will be classed too as ‘extra-comunitari’, substantially increase these figures and be classed, together with Malians, Moroccans, Nigerians and Mauritanians, as ‘extra-comunitari.’
The general opinion, which is diffuse throughout the local population regardless of their political affiliation, religious creed or social standing, is that having an increasing number of mostly single men, largely from Africa, without jobs or wives or family, placed within a comune which thrives principally on its tourist industry may have a deleterious effect. Furthermore, such men will by nature become restless when idle and could well enter into criminal activities (especially drug supplying) and prove a threat (as has already happened in many other parts of Italy) to weaker and more vulnerable members of society. Already symptoms of this are happening. More and more people are worried about leaving their cars in Bagni di Lucca’s station parking because of thefts and vandalism from ‘marocchini’. Many women are now scared of taking an evening walk through the lovely woods surrounding Bagni, and children, who formerly used to play unsupervised, are now increasingly being nannied.
The situation in a different modality has befallen many English seaside resorts. When taking one’s summer holidays in Spain became all the rage places like Margate, Bognor and Brightlingsea became overflow containers for homeless and destitute benefit-living people from London, simply because these towns had so many cheap and empty properties available. Only in recent years has Margate managed, through very industrious marketing, to regain its former Victorian popularity. But it took a long time to get back to the attractive resort it used to be.
I would not like to see Bagni di Lucca descend into another ‘container’ town, especially when it is trying to rebuild its faded tourist industry. I fully understand the concern and worries of many of those contributors who comment in our local facebook pages. Simply put, Italy can’t take it anymore and the rest of Europe has to pull itself together to come to a positive solution about ‘il problema degli immigrati’.
My own personal solution would be to help migrants at their country of birth by providing safe areas and cracking down heavily on those who, not only exploit people through arms and drugs, but fabricate illusions that Europe is a land of milk and honey whose populace will always greet them with open arms. It’s now become quite unsustainable for Italy and its population, however generous and hospitable they are, to carry on the same way.
Good luck to our new mayor. He will certainly have his work cut out for him with these seemingly impenetrable issues surrounding him ….
