Spotlight: How Italians feel like about migrant crisis

Eurobarometro, the European poll on citizens' opinions, has recently found in a survey that nearly a half of Italians believe their country should not help migrants and also view with suspicion foreign citizens who move into Italy. Really? Xinhua has recently talked to several Italians to hear what they think about the migrant crisis.

"The reality is quite different. In everyday life we see concrete examples of solidarity in places like Lampedusa --Italy's southernmost point which has seen the arrival of thousands of sea migrants. When faced with real humanitarian tragedies, Italy is always able to do its part," Fabrizio Luffarelli, a researcher at the studies center of Federbeton, the federation of the cement industry chain in Italy, told Xinhua.

In fact, media are largely to blame for antipolitics and the consequent worsening of public opinion, which exacerbates the perceptions of Italians on immigration, he said.

Luffarelli underlined that he has always wanted to keep a rational rather than an emotional approach to the migrant issue. "And in Italy, a country which lacks birth rate policies and has to deal with the strong impact of population aging, the contribution of migrants seems absolutely essential to me, though I understand how intolerance and lack of integration can easily rise," he said.

As shown by the dramatic situation at the border between Greece and Macedonia, the European Union (EU) historically has always wanted to restrict migration problems by confining the flows into peripheral areas, Luffarelli explained to Xinhua.

"But the instability of the Middle East has upended that strategy, and today we are witnessing latent tensions in the EU that mark an involution and in fact a substantial failure of reception policies, a short-sighted selfishness that I would never have expected from 'civilized' Europe," he pointed out.

Antonio Genovesi, a building surveyor, told Xinhua that he has nothing against the migrants in principle. "It is also because of the harshness that our forebears had to face in Canada, the United States, Belgium and other countries where they migrated many years ago that we Italians have a big heart," he said.

"But I have some doubts on whether it is right or not that we welcome all of them," Genovesi added. "It would be also important that these migrants are encouraged to remain home and rebuild their countries that have been destroyed by the war, like it happened in Italy decades ago, when citizens rolled up their sleeves and made their home place great," he told Xinhua.

"The EU member states are always in disagreement on their policy to cope with the humanitarian crises produced by unrests and famines. They promise that they will draw solutions, but then in fact Italy and a few other countries are receiving all the migrants with great difficulty. I do not feel myself to be protected by Europe in this sense," Genovesi stressed.

"Here in Rosarno -- a city in southern Italy -- where I am now working there are hundreds of black guys who work themselves to death in the orange grows to get around 20 euros (22 U.S. dollars) per day. I do not know where they live, certainly in terrible sanitary conditions. At the same time, many Italians are unemployed and pensioners are starving due to the austerity policies carried out in Europe and Italy in the past few years," he concluded.

After working for years as an employee of a company in Rome, Simone Veretti is currently unemployed and has decided to move to Ireland to find a job and start a new life. "Therefore I understand the need for help of many migrants, but I also think that the migration flows into Italy are totally wild and out of any kind of control, both medical and legal, from the institutions," he told Xinhua.

In his view, those who commit crimes "should be sent back to where they came from, no ifs or buts," while more attention should be paid to those who really need help. "However, I do not feel a EU presence in the migrant crisis at all. All European countries should take charge of the migrants and support Italy in the health checks, legal issues, housing management and so on," Veretti said.

But all of this, he also added, only makes sense if the export of arms to countries that are at war are categorically stopped. "We have to remember that most of the migrants come from conflict zones to which Italy itself has unfortunately exported weapons or sent troops," he told Xinhua.

Also according to Eurobarometro, some 50 percent of Italians do not feel themselves European citizens and more than 60 percent are convinced that Italy's interests are not taken into consideration in Brussels.

"I have been working for 10 years with migrant children and families in a multiethnic school of Rome. In fact, my life is now centered on helping migrants, also because I live in the same area where I work," Paola Genovesi, a liberal arts teacher from Italy, told Xinhua.

"My classroom has a total of 22 children, of which 21 are foreigners from nine different countries. Many were born in Italy and many arrived here later," Genovesi went on saying. "At the beginning someone tried to close our school, the Carlo Pisacane primary school in Rome, as they considered it as a sort of 'ghetto' where Italian families did not want to send their children anymore," she added.

Genovesi and other teachers had to fight for years to keep it open, and in the end they managed to make citizens understand how precious an intercultural world is. "Italian families have come back and our teaching model is now being studied from experts from all around the world," she said.

For her, the cultural enrichment has been huge. "The sacrifices that I have to carried out are the same big as the personal satisfactions that I get from meeting migrant families with a surprising civilization and humanity. I could write books and shoot films about," Genovesi told Xinhua.

Genovesi said she does feel herself to be European citizen, or "rather a citizen of the world," although she has not seen concrete help from the European institutions. "In our school there are not enough teachers and I work everyday more than my due as I believe that improvement of society should start from the commitment of citizens in their little," she highlighted.

Though agreeing with Genovesi's view, Tamara Picarazzi, who works in a group home, a private residence for children or young people who can't live with their families, which serves minors near Rome, invited Xinhua to consider that many Italian children have scars from abandonment or prejudice in the same way as the migrants have.

Nearly all the minors at her group home are from North Africa at present. "There are many economic interests in Italy around the migrant issue, and for this reason they seem to be given more assistance by the State, a perception well beyond the real entity of the phenomenon," she noted. Endit