[zzquo0iR]

The US had decades of strife because of these issues, Italy and the rest of Europe will too. It's only natural. Sure we had some strife, but the United States was energized by immigration. We welcomed millions. People in Europe need to embrace diversity instead of being fearful of it. Why make excuses.

A cruel end for Italy's asylum-seekers

The UN and the Vatican have protested against Italy's deportation of asylum-seekers – but they have been ignored


Last time round I smuggled a lawyer into the detention centre of Lampedusa, presenting her as my assistant, so that she could collect the written requests of 17 detainees who wanted to challenge their imminent deportation to Libya before the European court of human rights in Strasbourg. In 2005 I was a member of parliament during Silvio Berlusconi's previous term in office and a witness to the appalling conditions on Lampedusa and the summary proceedings prior to the deportation of hundreds of men to Libya. Astonishingly, this legal challenge worked, to the extent that the court ruled these men's case – which it is still considering – admissible, and ordered the Italian government to suspend their deportation. The flights to Libya stopped.


Now, with Berlusconi back in office, something similar is happening. Trained to rescue those in distress at sea, the Italian coastguards were shocked at first to learn that their orders had changed. On 7 May the crew of a patrol boat on duty between Lampedusa and Malta were told that the 227 men, women and children they had just pulled to safety from their unseaworthy boat were to be instantly deported back to Libya. To keep the frightened migrants quiet they lied to them about their final destination. I remember the police officers doing the same to the men they escorted back to Libya.


After more than 500 people had been intercepted and sent to Libya, Italy's interior minister Roberto Maroni proudly announced a "historic turn" in Italy's migration management policies. All thanks, he said, to the agreement signed last year with the Libyan government.


The UN high commissioner for refugees (head of UNHCR) and a Vatican spokesman have appealed, in vain, to the Italian authorities to desist from deporting migrants intercepted on the high seas back to Libya because of the risk of denying legitimate asylum-seekers their right to protection. Among the 200 people on board the last boat to be stopped, most of whose passengers were African, there were two pregnant women and two small babies.


It was definitely not humane, but was it legal? Not according to the UN. António Guterres, the high commissioner of UNHCR, has urged Italy to take the asylum-seekers who were deported back, so that their requests can be processed according to Italian law. His appeal has been supported by the UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon.


But this is election time and Silvio Berlusconi and his rightwing government have put the fight against illegal immigration at the heart of their campaign for the European elections. If the Vatican calls Berlusconi usually answers, especially if the pope is calling for curbs on civil liberties such as denying gay couples the right to civil unions or attempting to block a paraplegic woman's right to die. But the prime minister has turned a deaf ear to the Catholic church's calls for more humane and inclusive policies towards immigrants. Berlusconi has declared that he will continue to send boats back to Libya because he doesn't want Italy to become a "multi-ethnic society".


Berlusconi can afford to ignore both the UN and the church's calls because he will have noticed a complicit silence in Brussels. The European commission knows full well that Libya has no asylum policy and has been known to deport African asylum seekers to their countries of origin even when they risk persecution. Nonetheless commission spokesmen continue to dodge questions about the legality of Italy's latest moves. Jacques Barrot, the commissioner for justice and home affairs, knows Berlusconi's party, now merged with its former post-fascist allies, is likely to swell the ranks of the European People's party in Brussels. The same party group has already promised commission president Manuel Barroso its support for a second mandate.


It all sounds familiar. European governments didn't want to look soft on illegal immigration and let Berlusconi summarily deport over 1,000 people back to Libya in 2004. Once again, Antonio Lana, the human rights lawyer who pleaded the case of the 17 men on Lampedusa, thinks he can blow the whistle on what he considers a serious breach of the European convention on human rights, which explicitly forbids deporting people to countries where they risk persecution. This time, thanks to a human rights organisation working in Libya, Lana has just received the written requests of 24 asylum-seekers from Somalia and Eritrea who were sent back to Libya last week to represent them in a bid for the protection of the European court of human rights. Are Europe's ministers listening?

[simmons latex mattress]

Italian city tells Chinese community to 'remove lanterns, too Oriental'

news.scotsman.com — The local government of Treviso, in northern Italy, has ordered the city's Chinese restaurants to remove red lanterns from their windows because they look too 'oriental'. "It's spoiling the appearance of the city," said the head of the council's town planning department.

"The Chinese put up all sorts of stuff: lanterns, lions, dragons, there's even one (establishment) that did its whole front in oriental style."

Treviso, just outside Venice in the north-eastern Veneto region, is run by the populist, anti-immigrant Northern League. ...

"Treviso is a city of Veneto and Padania, it's certainly not an oriental city," deputy mayor Giancarlo Gentilini said, justifying the order to take down the lanterns within 10 days. ...

"From now on we'll be making regular checks and after the lanterns we'll be looking at all the other decorations around the entrances of the oriental restaurants," Marton warned.

Oh, the horror! What's next? Sushi bars with plastic sushi in the window?

Have those Italians forgotten where they got the idea for noodles and ravioli in the first place!? After all, it was the Chinese -- well, actually the Mongols who conquered China in 1280 and ruled it until 1368 -- who were nice enough to load Marco Polo up with lamian 拉麵 (Japanese: ramen, Italian: spaghetti) and jiaozi 餃子 (Japanese: gyoza, Italian: ravioli) so he wouldn't starve on the long trip back to Venice.

And this is the thanks they get?

What if China had put up a high fence along its border with the barbarians and kept Marco Polo and all the other illegal immigrants out. What would the Italians be eating now? Probably just boiled cornmeal (polenta) and a primitive grain called farro. Yummy.

[Caunnysup]

Try to put up hanging Chinese lanterns on upper Madison avenue in the historic district.

The lanterns in the center of these cities are against landmark and historic district laws and fall under the catagory of signage. The same holds true here for all sorts of signage styles and materials.

Is something so unusual about that?

----

As to the "asylum seekers"... the should in most cases be turned back.

The US solution: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26379348/

--

[kylsq0Ln]

Personally I think the US has every right to protect it's borders and control immmigration as it sees fit.

One would hope that things are at least done humanely, but the US is also not that much interested in what the UN has to say if it goes against their interests.

There will be many years of strife in Europe over diversity... I hope that our cities are not subject to all the devastating rioting, ghettos, decay, white flight, gated communities and so forth that the US went through... but I think some of it will be unavoidable.

[Kimeoffessyr]

Try to put up hanging Chinese lanterns on upper Madison avenue in the historic district.

True, but if Bloomberg says they are too Oriental, he can forget about a third term.

[greeferweq]

True, but if Bloomberg says they are too Oriental, he can forget about a third term.

Yes, probably.

I imagine he would instead have to say that they "clash with the established asthetics of the neighborhood".

--

[zabiqapara]

BTW, there seems to be a "shock value" in the way these articles are received. Similar to Jesse Jackson and Hymietown. "Horrors, black people can be racist. "

It's part of the human condition, and it doesn't go away easily.

[TessUnsonia]

Despite Fabrizio's predictable assurances otherwise, there is a racist streak in Italy (and a homophobic one also) that seems to be more pronounced than in other western European nations. I hope the Italians will begin to examine this unfortunate part of their national psyche and come to grips with it. Denial won't make that happen any faster.
Spain, Italy: Two tactics for tackling illegal immigration

MADRID; and milan, Italy - Miriana spends her nights sleeping in a park, and her days hunched on a stoop outside a Madrid shop, begging for money. The young woman admits that she earned more in Italy, where she lived for a year. But for this Romanian immigrant, who is also ethnically Roma (or gypsy), the decision to move to Spain was easy.

"Here, the people are better," she explains in broken Spanish. "They don't have as much hate."


Both Spain and Italy, situated across from Africa on the Mediterranean coast, have faced huge influxes of illegal immigrants over the past couple of years – 18,000 intercepted by Spain last year alone, and 12,000 by Italy so far this year. But their governments, though sharing a conviction that the problem urgently needs to be curbed, have taken different approaches to reach that common goal.



While Spain struggles to find the balance between limiting immigration and protecting human rights, Italy has implemented state of emergency measures and even fingerprinting of Roma – measures decried as "xenophobic" by the human rights commissioner for the Council of Europe, Thomas Hammarberg.


"The Spanish government has a very strict policy," says Roberto Malini, president of the Italian human rights organization EveryOne. "The Italians have an intimidatory policy: the idea is to scare immigrants, so that when they go home, they can tell their countrymen that Italy is no place for foreigners."


Italy: State of emergency


On July 25, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government passed a decree that allows the government to use military troops to monitor the country's 16 immigrant internment centers and to deploy another 3,000 soldiers to several cities in an effort to control crime, which is often blamed on immigrants.


Parliament also recently passed a law specifying that illegal immigrants convicted of crimes can be held for up to a third longer than Italians convicted of the same felony. Property rented to illegal immigrants can be confiscated under the new legislation.


These steps have troubled human rights activists. "At the identification centers used to hold North Africans, immigrants often face violence and intimidation," says Mr. Malini. "But they're not in a position to complain, because they'll be expelled."


Italy's measures have hit the Roma most severely. Though some have lived in Italy for years, many came from Romania when that country joined the European Union in 2007. Berlusconi's predecessor, former Prime Minister Romano Prodi, had ordered some deportations of Roma, despite their EU citizenship. Under Mr. Berlusconi, Italy has gone further, initiating a census of Roma that began in June and included fingerprinting.



This discrimination has been fed by media headlines such as "Invasion of the Nomads." And it has trickled down in other ways as well. In July, the rightwing Northern League party presented a proposal in one region that would ban "kebab shops" and Chinese restaurants from city centers because they were "incompatible with the historical context." Vigilante groups in southern Italy have set fire to Roma enclaves and attacked their inhabitants.


Spain: Balancing rights, crackdown


In Spain, where legal immigrants alone make up nearly 9 percent of the population, Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero surprised many at the start of his second term this spring by directing an about-face of his administration's previously lenient immigration policies.
In June, just three years after authorizing a mass legalization of 750,000 undocumented workers, Mr. Zapatero expressed support for the EU's Return Directive – a policy that allows member states to hold undocumented migrants, including minors, for up to 18 months, and, if deported, bans them from returning.


Faced with a 10.7 percent unemployment rate, Zapatero's new labor minister has announced a plan that would pay jobless immigrants to return to their home countries. The Catalan regional government, among the most progressive in Spain, has authorized a program that would temporarily segregate newly arrived immigrant children from non-European countries in special schools designed to better prepare them for integration into the regular educational system. The government is expending greater resources on preventing migrant-laden boats from reaching Spanish shores, and more frequently deporting those who do land.



Zapatero's immigration policy has been criticized by immigrants-rights organizations. Antonio Abad, secretary-general of the Spanish Commission for Aid to Refugees (CEAR), points out, for example, that by increasing the monitoring of the Moroccan and Mauritanian coasts, Spanish authorities have compelled sub-Saharan migrants to begin their sea journey from points farther south, endangering themselves even further. "It takes the people who need the most protection and makes things even harder for them," he says. He also criticizes Zapatero's support for the Return Directive. "When you limit one person's rights, you limit all of society," he adds.


Yet Zapatero has balanced these more rigid policies with other kinds of efforts. He appointed the first immigrant to his cabinet in April and has promised to extend the vote to legal immigrants by the end of this term. Those efforts, say Abad, make a difference. "On the positive side, we can see that the government has a strategy for integration.... It's totally different from the racist measures you see in Italy."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0807/p04s01-woeu.html

[Inettypofonee]

Let's see... from The Christian Science Monitor article I read the following:

- Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero surprised many at the start of his second term this spring by directing an about-face of his administration's previously lenient immigration policies.

- In June, just three years after authorizing a mass legalization of 750,000 undocumented workers, Mr. Zapatero expressed support for the EU's Return Directive – a policy that allows member states to hold undocumented migrants, including minors, for up to 18 months, and, if deported, bans them from returning.

- Zapatero's new labor minister has announced a plan that would pay jobless immigrants to return to their home countries.

- Zapatero's immigration policy has been criticized by immigrants-rights organizations.

- Spanish authorities have compelled sub-Saharan migrants to begin their sea journey from points farther south, endangering themselves even further.

- The government is expending greater resources on preventing migrant-laden boats from reaching Spanish shores, and more frequently deporting those who do land.

- The Catalan regional government, among the most progressive in Spain, has authorized a program that would temporarily segregate newly arrived immigrant children from non-European countries in special schools designed to better prepare them for integration into the regular educational system. ( LOL... we know what that means).

Yet, "Antonio Abad, secretary-general of the Spanish Commission for Aid to Refugees " claims : "On the positive side, we can see that the government has a strategy for integration.... It's totally different from the racist measures you see in Italy."

Yes, indeed... I bet he does claim that.

LOL.

[polleroy]

"Here, the people are better," she explains in broken Spanish. "They don't have as much hate."

Oh well, I guess not everyone's experience matches your Albanian friends. Again, all you do is deny and defend. Reality is a lot more nuanced than what you portray on all things regarding your country. (notwithstanding your opinion on Florence) Here you go again.