Midway through a recent, turbulent campaign for regional elections, centre-right leaders Silvio Berlusconi of Forza Italia and Northern League leader Umberto Bossi sealed a born-again political alliance by unveiling a new immigration policy.
They called for strict new immigration quotas, tough prison sentences for those who smuggled in "boat people" and the use of naval force, including the right to open fire, on smugglers in Italian territorial waters.
That new policy may not have been central to the centre-right's resounding success in the regional elections last month. But it probably did it no harm and it reflected Italian concern about the immigrant question, which has been high on the political agenda for much of the last decade.
Four years ago some Italians were shocked to read the headline, "Black Denny Is Miss Italia". She was Denny Mendez, an 18-year-old coloured woman, an Italian citizen from the Dominican Republic who had lived in Italy for four years. Her win represented a small but significant indication of the changing times. Italy, which as recently as 40 years ago exported migrant workers, has become a favoured destination for economic refugees from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America.
The gradual shift towards a multi-ethnic Italian society is recent. In contrast to EU partners like Britain and France, modern Italy does not have an extensive colonial past. While post-war Britain and France were marked by the immigration and eventual integration of communities from former colonies, Italy has seen the systematic arrival of large numbers of non-EU immigrati only in the last 20 years.
Italy's geographic position, at the crossroads between southern Europe, north Africa and the former Communist East Bloc, has made it an inevitable point of entry into western Europe for migrants in search of a better life. Italy's extensive coastline (7,600 km) has also made it an easy target for smugglers - usually linked into organised crime - transporting "boat people" into Italy.
While some migrant workers arrive legally, equipped with a residence permit, most arrive by clandestine means. The Ministry of the Interior reports that in the first four months this year, more than 20,000 illegal immigrants, arriving mainly on the coasts of Puglia, Calabria and Sicily in the south, were found and expelled.
The ministry figures indicate that by the end of last year there were more than 1,100,000 legal, non-EU residents in Italy. A Caritas report of last autumn calculated that Italy's "foreign community" (including US and EU nationals but dominated by non-EU nationals) has increased more than 60 per cent in the decade, from 781,000 in 1990 to 1.25 million in 1998.
The last decade in Italy was marked by the systematic influx of east European migrants, prompted initially by the downfall of East Bloc communism and then exacerbated by the break-up of the former Yugoslavia as well as by socio-economic problems such as Albania's 1997 banking crisis.
While it is true that one of the most symbolic and biblical images of the Italian 1990s was that of a rusty old Albanian cargo carrier limping into Bari harbour dangerously overcrowded with would-be refugees, it comes as a mild surprise to find that the largest foreign community in Italy is Moroccan (145,843) ahead of the Albanian community (91,537). Next come the Philippines (67,574), then Tunisia (47,261), ex-Yugoslavia (40,848), Romania (37,114), China (38,038), Senegal (35,897), Poland (28,199), Sri Lanka (31,294), Egypt (27,664), Peru (26,832), Brazil (19,747) and India (25,320) (Caritas data, re December 31st, 1998).
The majority of non-EU migrants arriving in Italy clearly come under the category of "economic" rather than "political" refugee. Although there have been occasions in the recent past (during the Kosovo crisis last year and during the Albanian economic crisis of 1997) when the equivalent of short-term political asylum was issued on a large scale, those situations were more the exception than the rule.
The clandestine immigrant, if apprehended at point of entry, is now almost certainly destined for immediate repatriation. The current procedure (as laid down by the "Turco-Napolitano" Law 40) sees such migrants lodged in state-run, temporary holding centres (there are those who would call them prisons) while their papers and identity documents are processed.
After 20 to 30 days they are repatriated, unless they can prove they have a job or convincing, life-threatening reasons to be granted political asylum. Just over 2,000 people were granted political asylum last year, while more than 72,000 migrants were expelled. Those who arrive legally can do so on a "sponsorship", in effect, a definite work offer. For this year, a quota of 63,000 has been set for new immigrants but many think this could rise to 200,000 in the next few years.
There is a widespread perception that a significant percentage of non-EU migrants are involved in crime, from drug trafficking to prostitution rings. That is borne out by figures showing that between 1997 and 1998, the number of non-EU migrants arrested or charged for criminal activities rose 34 per cent, from 58,901 to 89,457. Of those, 86.4 per cent or 77,290 were illegal migrants.
A recent poll found that 73.5 per cent of those polled believed that the presence of immigrants leads to increased criminal activity and 61.8 per cent argued that illegal immigrants should be immediately expelled even if they have committed no crime. Intriguingly, however, 61.8 per cent did not believe that immigrants take work from Italians.
These last two responses best sum up Italian attitudes - while many associate immigrants with crime, a majority recognises that Italy needs immigrants due to its declining population and because there are many varieties of manual, labouring work that Italians do not want to do.