Apart from the climate the other big talking point in the Italian government is illegal immigration. Ever since the 1980s Italy has been a preferred landing point for persons fleeing from Africa and Asia. Before that decade there was little illegal immigration worth considering, even from Rom communities. Indeed in the 1930’s, under Mussolini’s re-settlement project, Italians were emigrating to their African colonies in Somalia, Eritrea and Abyssinia to set up new lives growing tomatoes and oranges, building railways and administering schools and hospitals. On my Italian side there is one relative who was born in the colonies: Asmara, capital of Eritrea, a city which is a monument to the finest Italian Art Deco architecture. Even after the Second World War Italy regained control of part of its former East African Empire, Somalia which it maintained as a protectorate until 1960. The father of one of my school friend’s wife, Endre Hevezi, and who graduated in architecture at the university of  Budapest in 1945, specialised in ceramics and enamelling and decorated the Debra Libanos Cathedral in Ethiopia where he designed the mosaics on the exterior front facade and stained glass windows for the monastery.

So what went wrong? Why did immigration of Italians to Africa turn around to immigration of Africans to Italy? The reasons have been listed many times; the Dick Whittington dream of a better life in European cities paved with gold, civil war, famine, global heating, escape from persecution, people trafficking gangs and so forth.

Several labels have been applied to these huddled masses ‘invading’, according to Italy’s Prime Minister Meloni and her cabinet, the peninsula. Are they refugees, economic migrants, foreign mafia or do they just want to reach their relatives already established in Europe? Clearly the lands these souls have left must be in terribly dire straits in order for them to risk a journey which has already this year seen over five hundred drown in one single boat. However, I can optimistically see a time when life in their country of origin will again be liveable. Already some of the large and very industrious Chinese population of Prato is decanting to the People’s Republic which is offering far greater economic possibilities than ever before. Increasingly it’s rare to find new consumer goods in our homes which do not bear the initials PRC on them. Other Asian countries like Vietnam are following China’s lead in welcoming back populations which less than fifty years ago had to flee in small boats. Within Europe’s own populations the clichéd Polish plumber abroad is finding that he is more in demand in his birthplace and with better pay simply because that country has now a shortage of plumbers.

Meanwhile, with daily reports of distressed small boats packed with refugees not just across the Med but also, as that country’s foreign secretary laments, across the English Channel the Continent’s long-term residents are increasingly getting immured to the facts and figures. Indeed, these have become almost like daily litanies of road accident or drug overdose figures.

The saddest thing about refugees/economic migrants is that they are mainly young and educated. Precisely the sort of person that the country they are fleeing from needs! What’s the point of having a largely senile and diseased population in a nation which yearns to have an energetic and accomplished workforce to build up its economic life?

There will be a time when a young population will return to these countries – and I’m not talking about that ridiculous plan to export illegal immigrants to the country which has undergone the largest holocaust since Herr Hitler’s ‘final solution’.

So what will the morally correct ‘final solution’ be to illegal immigration in Europe from those countries with unfortunate life-styles which fail to control repression of women, religious persecution, unlimited pollution, unliveable temperatures, lawless gangs, endemic diseases, civil wars, massive illiteracy, primitive health care, gargantuan greed among the political classes: a life which in the memorable phrase of Hobbes is nasty, brutish and short.

I do not know. I’m neither a politician, an economist, a philosopher, a moralist nor a prophet.  One thing is certain, however, our society is changing ever more at an exponential rate and it’s changing because of these three main factors

1. Global warming.
2. Digitalisation (this includes, obviously AI).
3. Emi/immigration.

Recently I noted the change wrought by factor 3 during a visit to London. An area near the North Circular road I remember, when we married almost fifty years ago, had its fair selection and range of shop owners and restaurants ranging from chippies to Italian trattorias to Indian curry houses but now has almost 90% concentration on customers from one global area. To eat a plate of ravioli I must turn further afield where there is also hope for a pub’s Sunday lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pud. Why? It’s because whether it be legal or illegal immigration the rate of immigration should be properly controlled so that incoming populations are able to fully merge in with pre-existing groups. This has not really occurred. What I fear has happened to large chunks of London is a ghettoization on a massive scale. OK the word ‘ghetto’ is conventionally used to refer to the Jewish population. However, ‘ghetto’ is originally a word referring to a particular area of Venice which subsequently became peopled by Jewish refugees.  In this respect the French government tries to oppose such ghettoization albeit with very limited success. In the UK a multicultural ideology is prevalent so that, for example, there are no laws preventing people from publicly manifesting their religious faiths and cultural values. One of the most curious sights in London was seeing a girl in a short-skirted light summer frock talking with her friend who is clad in black cloth from head to toe with only a couple of eyes peeping through her vestment. Admirable some would say. In France even the hijab is not allowed in public offices and schools for that country’s aim is to make a ‘decent’ French citizen out of any foreigner that settles there.  Hence not knowing the Gallic tongue is almost a cardinal sin.

Italy wavers between Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism and French institutional nationhood. Sometimes Italians heartily accept third-worlders. Sometimes they don’t. And if someone wishes to learn their beautiful language then Italians (unlike the French) are usually all too willing to help. Regarding English which, despite the valiant efforts of Esperantists, is next to Chinese the most commonly spoken language on the planet (so much so that, despite the Italian equivalent of the Academie Francaise, the Academia della Crusca, there is a veritable assault of English words and phrase in the language), I remember a student from the Indian sub-continent attending my evening English classes in London. I asked him (in Hindi which I speak) ‘How long have you been in England now?’ ‘About ten years he answered. ‘But haven’t you learned English?’  I queried. ‘Oh because you know how it is. I work for my uncle’s company. I live in my aunt’s family. I go to my local temple. So I never needed to learn it or had the opportunity to use it.’

Actually the real danger of ghettoization in Italy may not come from third-world immigrants. I leave it to the reader to find which population may be most responsible for it. It has been described in the following words:  introspective, patriotic, insular, xenophobic, brave, small-minded, polite, insecure, arrogant, compulsive gambler, humorous, reserved, conservative, reticent, hypocritical, racist, boring, a royalist, condescending, depressed, keen gardener, semi-literate, hard-working, unambitious, ironic, passionless, cosmopolitan, whinger, hard-headed, liberal, a traditionalist, couch potatoes, obsequious, masochist, complacent, homely, pragmatic, cynical, decent, melancholic, unhealthy, poor cook, pompous, eccentric, inebriated, proud, self-deprecating, tolerant, inhibited, shopaholics, conceited, courageous, idiosyncratic, mean (bad tippers), courteous, jingoistic, stuffy, overweight, well-mannered, pessimistic, disciplined, habitual queuers, stoic, modest, gloomy, shy, serious, apathetic, honest, wimpish, fair, snobbish, friendly, quaint, decadent, civilised, dogmatic, scruffy, prejudiced, class conscious and soccer hooligan…………

.

I leave myself out of this pageant of descriptions because of both my mother’s and wife’s nationalities.