Italy Resists Diversity, Despite Massive Wave of Foreigners

European attitudes toward immigrants are hardening, especially in Italy, where the government has just proposed the most restrictive anti-immigrant law in Europe. There’s plenty of scaremongering—Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has suggested that Italians will end up like Native Americans on reservations if immigrants have their way—and the tactic seems to working, writes Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times.

Yet at the same time, Italy’s birth rate is dropping, and few native Italians want to bother with hard labor and low-level jobs. Albanians and Romanians care for many of the elderly, for instance, while immigrants from India tend the cows whose milk is made into Parmesan cheese.

But it seems there’s little evidence of that reflected in mainstream Italian culture. “It subsists on an all-white, all-native, monoethnic diet of Italian game shows, Italian television mini-series, Italian advertisements on cable stations for improbable vibrating contraptions that promise to jiggle fat away, and Italian pop music,” Kimmelman writes. “Even Roman schoolchildren no longer stray far from a spaghetti-with-ragú diet now that an intercultural city program to serve one international-themed lunch a month has been abandoned by the new center-right government, heeding some Italian mothers, who doubted the nutritional value of falafel and curry.”

Photo by annafdd via Flickr (Creative Commons).

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