The passage to Italy - and back again

Early on a Sunday morning last month, highway police stopped a truck on an autostrada just outside Foggia, in Puglia, southern Italy. In the trailer, they found a "cargo" of 13 men, all Iraqi Kurds, all alive and relatively well. Officially, the truck was transporting leather goods from Kosovo to Germany. Its 30-year-old Macedonian driver claimed to know nothing about his "cargo".

Those 13 Kurds were the lucky ones. Three months earlier, the dead bodies of six of their compatriots had been found close to a ring road, again outside Foggia. All six men had died from asphyxiation, almost certainly from having been locked up in a cargo container.

Italy's geographic position, at the crossroads between Southern Europe and North Africa and between Western Europe and the former communist Eastern bloc, has made it an inevitable "point of entry" to the West for non-EU immigrants in search of a better life. Its extensive coastline (7,600 kilometres) has also made it an easy target for those smugglers (usually linked to organised crime and mainly Balkans-based) engaged in the trade of transporting clandestine immigrants.

In the case of the Kurds, for example, police sources report that a would-be immigrant pays up to £1,000 for a "passage to Italy", a passage that can take up to six months. Many of the Iraqi Kurds have retraced their steps for the benefit of Italian police, reporting that the first phase of their journey is usually to Turkey, either on foot or on horseback.

Once in Turkey, the immigrants go on a "waiting list" as their "travel agents" find suitable lorries to take them first to Greece and then across the Adriatic to Italy. If and when the clandestine immigrants survive the journey, they are often simply dumped on the Italian roadside, left to fend for themselves.

Only a small percentage of immigrants (2,000 in 1999, mainly Kurds) successfully apply for political asylum.

Integrating non-Italians into Italian society is made difficult by the widespread perception that a significant percentage of non-EU immigrants are involved in crime, ranging from drug trafficking to prostitution. That perception is borne out by figures which show that between 1997 and 1998, the number of non-EU immigrants either arrested or charged for criminal activities rose 34 per cent from 58,901 to 89,457. Of those arrested or charged, 86.4 per cent (or 77,290) were illegal immigrants, without a permit to stay.

"The problem is finding housing, not work," says Alessandro Zanini, of Bologna's Office for Immigrants, Refugees and Nomads. "There is no shortage of work, but there are still many people who simply will not rent to non-EU migrants. That prejudice is still there."

Under a programme called "The Multi-Ethnic City", Bologna has tried to address the vexed question of integration, offering immigrants a limited form of social support in terms of advice about their legal rights, work, housing and, importantly, education for their children.

Twenty years ago, according to Zanini, the only foreigners who came to Bologna were political refugees or students, people from Chile, Argentina or Greece. "That has all changed now," he says. "Not only do people come from the Maghreb zone, from other parts of Africa and from Eastern Europe, but also they now come with their families, with their wives and children. . .

"We now have a situation where we need to get all our municipal forms and documents translated, not so much into English as into Arabic, Chinese, Urdu, Albanian etc."

The immigration question is sure to feature prominently in Italy's forthcoming general election campaign, with the centre-left and centre-right bitterly divided on the issue. Last spring, during a turbulent regional election campaign, centre-right leaders Silvio Berlusconi of Forza Italia and Northern League leader Umberto Bossi called for strict new immigration quotas, tough prison sentences for those who smuggle in "boat people" and the use of navy force, including the right to open fire on smugglers in Italian territorial waters.

But these calls for a crackdown, especially those from elements in the centre-right such as the Northern League, are at odds with repeated requests from Northern Italian entrepreneurs, desperate for workers, for the quota of non-EU migrants to be increased. Ironically, the very regions in which the Northern League draws its strongest following (Lombardy, Veneto, Friuli-Venezia-Giulia) are among those where immigrants most easily find work. Put simply, both demographically and economically, Italy needs non-EU migrant workers. Like it or not, Italy's future is multi-ethnic.