Italy Resists Diversity, Despite Massive Wave of Foreigners

Travel Blog  •  Joanna Kakissis  •  06.27.08 | 12:17 PM ET

imageEuropean 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).

Tags: Europe, Italy

Joanna Kakissis's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, among other publications. A contributor to the World Hum blog, she's currently a Ted Scripps fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado in Boulder.


6 Comments for Italy Resists Diversity, Despite Massive Wave of Foreigners

James Martin 06.27.08 | 5:58 PM ET

Resisting diversity is pretty universal. Besides, you can’t build a traditional culture (with all those yummy, tried and true, three-ingredients-or-fewer pasta sauces) with a pot full of constantly changing ideas.

I have an apartment in a small village in far northern Tuscany, and folks there have accepted the Moroccan caregiver who takes care of the woman downstairs like one of the family. They’ve really seemed to enjoyed the ribs I barbecued for them on the 4th of July (except that the hot sauce wasn’t piccante enough) and wolfed down the potato skins with pancetta I made last time. When I left them they were all making plans to come to the US to visit.

I was convinced by the vast majority of expats that none of this would ever happen, that Italians had an aversion to any food ever prepared in foreign lands, that Tuscans didn’t do hot peppers, and that anyone that came from more than 15km away was a foreigner and would be given the silent treatment at best.

I’m glad everyone was wrong.
It’s true you can’t exactly get Romanian food here, but a Romanian owns my favorite Ristorante/Pizzeria and cooks the fish just right. I’m fine with that.

Besides, a culture isn’t every really represented by what’s on television, especially when one of its most popular networks is run by a crook who just happens to dabble in politics—and very few people watch the thing anyway.

HS 06.27.08 | 10:16 PM ET

As an admirer of Italian language and culture, I hope that Italy takes the lead in resistance to non-European immigration and phoney “diversity.”  Italians have gotten by very well with their own home-grown chaotic stability, and would never have given the world the Renaissance if their population had been full of Albanians.  They swept the Mediterranean free of Moorish fleets, too.  If they had had “diversity” forced onto them centuries ago, what became the healthy diversity of different European countries never would have been born.

pam 06.28.08 | 12:40 PM ET

As a former expat of Austria, I feel okay making the observation that it’s not just the Italians who are resisting diversity. The Austrian feed-the-poor programs dishing up pork based meals in Muslim communities, the head scarf politics in France, the success of Dutch and Belgian anti-immigrant politicians…

This is the one issues that gets me all patriotic. I accept that the US is deeply flawed, but I was happy to return to a diversity of integration rather than one of separation.

FWIW/YMMV/etc.

Ling 06.28.08 | 11:37 PM ET

A bit too late, I think, to close the national doors… Third world immigrants have spread across Europe and are now integral parts of the community. It would be kinda fun to see Silvio Berlusconi as the Big Chief of a reservation…

SkyMaster 06.29.08 | 3:05 PM ET

It is a world trend. 

Wasn’t it just in the news that in Africa people were fleeing, I think it was Mozambiqque, because the locals were chasing down and beating up the immigrants?
France has had how many riots over immigration?
The US is, or moreover, was arguing over illeagal immigration.
I think in Italy it is the same fight. Immigration is one thing, illegal immigration, they’re tired of.

Italy likes to show all white people, but they did have a black Miss Italy in 1996.

the biggest loser 10.01.08 | 3:20 AM ET

Such interesting read and information, thanks for sharing this post, I’ve already bookmarked your blog.

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.