Last July, Padua, in the northern part of Italy, built a wall around an immigrant estate with a high crime rate. The wall is about 270 feet long and about 10 feet high, and constructed of metal.This was done by a leftist, multiculturally orthodox town government following riots in the area. In addition to building the wall, the authorities have “relocated” all the illegal immigrants they could find.
Now there is a new initiative, aimed toward restoring peace and attempting to integrate a large variety of ethnic groups into the local population. The new fix will send out 18 immigrants to patrol trouble spots and do “cultural” mediation.
The one-year-long experimental project is innovative in Italy and its objective is to boost the integration of immigrants and improve relations between foreigners and local citizens, said Maria Luisa Ferretti, a deputy city police chief.
“The ‘cultural mediators’ will help immigrants relate in a positive way with local police forces and help their lives along with that of locals,” Ferretti told Adnkronos International (AKI). The 18 will wear a special uniform when they patrol the city, which they will do on a daily basis.
“The main thing is that they talk to people, help them out of difficult situations,” Feretti said.
Once you look at the relative numbers of Italians to immigrants, you know where this “experiment” is headed. Padua has a native population of about 250,000 people. The immigrants number 70,000; they consist of French and English speaking Africans, Arabs, Chinese, Tamil, and Hindi speakers along with some central Europeans. They also reproduce at a rapid rate: a third of all newborns are of foreign born parents.
The report says that much of the conflict comes from the disputes among native Italian and Muslim gangs, fighting a turf war over drugs. If this is the case, then the city ought to take out insurance on this brave patrol of 18 people. Drug dealers responding to “cultural mediation”???
This scheme is doomed. A Moroccan volunteer member claimed:
“Moving towards a multi-cultural society means just this: recognizing the rights of people to maintain their identity while respecting the rules of the country they live in,” she said.
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I’d offer to do a follow up in a year to let you know how this turns out, but my intuition tells me this is another pie-in-the-sky utopian fix-it job. The wall? Good idea. Removing the illegals? Bound to improve the situation. But 18 people to patrol a polyglot of 70,000 non-native, multi-ethnic people? Dream on.
This “experiment” will fall down the memory hole before the year is gone.
12 comments:
Very informative. Is immigration just another form of globalization?
Important article at New English Review, setting out what needs to be done:
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=7242&sec_id=7242
Museful,
In a way you're right. The massive movement of peoples from the Third World to the West was a convenience for some countries and deliberate policy of others, who were bent on breaking up the borders of the 20th century.
Foreign labor was cheaper; second class citizens were easy to manipulate; and the economic statism of the Western countries with their wide dole system guaranteed the problem we have now.
The one in America with Mexican immigrants has been building that long, too. I remember as a child the fierce anti-Mexican bigotry of the native population.
And twenty five years ago I read an artilce -- in the Atlantic Monthly, I think -- about the coming generation's problems with illegal immigrants in ...Spain.
"Globalization" can't be reduced to mere greed. It's much more complicated than making villains out of those who run businesses. It's much more about the corruption and lack of opportunity in the exporting-the-citizens-to-keep-the-status-quo countries. Notice most of these places -- from the Middle East thru Africa -- are polities who didn't want, still don't want, to clean up their act.
Without the interference of the UN we might never have come to this point. If we could get rid of both the UN and the EU, the world would be a safer, saner place.
Thanks, vol in law. I'll go look at it. Meanwhile, I'm going to make a link out of your information.
As a general rule you can use the template found at the beginning of our comments following the post to make a live link.
In between the quote marks in that template you put in the link, which in your case was http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=7242&sec_id=7242.
Make sure you keep the quote marks intact. Then, where it says My website you pick a name for your link, thus giving us more information about the item you want us to see.
Thus, http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=7242&sec_id=7242 becomes Where Do We Go From Here.
You probably already know how to do this, and yeah it is a bit more trouble, but don't forget how lazy we blog readers are. If we can click a link instead of having to cut and paste it into a new window, we're much more likely to go there...
And, in this case, maybe a very worthy site gets a small increase in traffic.
/lecture
And now, V-i-l, having read an excellent and informed essay, I'm going to fisk it from the pov of Gates of Vienna and other parties, because I think the weak link in her premise is "legislation." Maybe somewhere down the road, when our Imperial Congress has had its nose rubbed in a mess of hubris, this outline of action would be feasible. But first you'd have to eliminate the overwhelming influence of CAIR and other Muslim lobby groups. You'd have to shake out all the Muslim/Marxist academics. You'd have to change the anti-American status quo in the media.
Our stance, v-i-l, is that WE ARE ON OUR OWN.
All of the above groups will do everything they can to fight change that isn't directed toward dhimmification. Please see The Center for Vigilant Freedom. Join a growing force which is by now international, and determined to make a difference.
Whatever you do, don't depend on any form of government to help. On the local level they're too scared. For example, the Board of Supervisors in Charlotte County voted to let a street name be put up at the Jamaat al Fuqra compound -- a street named for a known terrorist who is not allowed in this country and who may have been involved in the death of Daniel Perl. Why did they do this? Because those ex-felons who live at the compound in Red House are some scary dudes. IOW, intimidation, pure and simple.
On the higer levels, people have been turned. CAIR holds sensitivity training for the FBI, for heaven's sake.
And the politicians are poseurs who suck your blood and use the taxes to build special Muslim toilet facilities.
As I said, we're ON OUR OWN. Join CVF and make a difference.
If you let too many people leave their native countries, their homelands will never get any better.
They should stay home and fix their own problems, and not simply export them.
Hi Dymphna - if it's true that WE ARE ON OUR OWN, that would indicate that western governments are in enemy hands, which it seems to me means either perpetual tyranny (if those governments successfuly control their populations) or the total collapse of western civilisation (if those populations refuse to accept government control).
I thought the article was interesting because it proposed a way in which western civilisation might survive, which seems to me a desirable goal.
Now, I think your position is a good fallback - if western civilisation is to end, at least with people like you around there's a prospect that some part of western culture can endure, and perhaps one day give birth to a new civilisation. But the last Dark Age lasted roughly 1300 years, we've had civilisation in my estimation for a little over 300 (since roughly the 1688 Glorious Revolution), and I'd rather not wait another 1300 years to see it again!
The Dark Ages weren't *that* long, unless you're going to include the medieval period, which I don't. I would span them from about 600 to, at most, 1100. After that, the light begins to glow again.
And they were never totally dark, anyway. The monasteries kept the light on.
Dymphna-
Agreed.
And "How The Irish Saved Civilization" is required reading against the myth of the "Dark" Ages.
Wow! A post in Gates Of Vienna about my city! And that explains the situations better than all the thousands others have been written in Italian!
I read Roman and Greek works, I see civilisation. I read writings of 800, 1200, 1400 or 1600 AD, I see barbarism.
LATIN was barbaric???
da Vinci was born in 1452. He's a barbarian???
Michaelangelo -- 1475
Elizabethean music is barbaric?
Here's a real barbarian: Chaucer, born 1342.
Or even worse, "Piers Plowman" written about 1360. Guess I wasted my time on *that* barbarian.
How about Bernard of Clairvaux? Is this reformer *really* a barbarian?
Finally, this barbaric period will have to take the Magna Carta -- 1215-- and leave your civilized times... which, of course, means that hundreds of years down the road there will be no Declaration of Independence.
And your arbitrary dates leave all those magnificent barbarian cathedrals unbuilt.
Please define barbaric?
Umm...what planet are you on?
jeez
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