WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, UCADI #169: Fortress Europe (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Europe is the region of the world in which the guarantees of rights are highest

and where one can enjoy the highest standard of living, but it is at the same
time the most affected by the demographic crisis: it is for this reason that a
growing flow of migrants from all over the world. In its territory, the elderly
(65 years old) are higher in percentage than fifteen year olds, while globally a
quarter of the world population is under 15 years old. In the last decade, the
continent's population has decreased, while deaths have exceeded births in many
countries, so much so that Eurostat predicts that 190,000 fewer children will be
born in 2030 than in 2020, if we look at the eighth Report on European
Territorial Cohesion (European data journalism network). This even if not all
Member States will close the decade with a negative balance.
However, the demographic decline is not uniform and nine out of 27 EU states have
recorded an increasing fertility rate. Among these Hungary, which has increased
from 1.25 to 1.59 children per woman and the Czech Republic, which has risen from
1.51 to 1.83, equaling the record historically held by France, whose figure, in
recent years , is declining. There is also an improvement in Germany, another
country with major historical problems of falling birth rates, where the
fertility of women has gone from 1.39 to 1.58 children (but which has enjoyed an
increase in population thanks to massive emigration).
There are only three countries that ended 2021 with a higher birth rate than in
2010: Germany (+15.7%), Hungary (+7.8%) and Austria (+2 .1%) and. however, this
is not enough to avoid a decline in the number of their respective inhabitants.
Net of migratory phenomena, in order to have a stable population, a fertility
rate higher than 2 would be needed, which has not happened in Europe since 1975
in any country.
As far as Italy is concerned, ours is one of the least fertile countries in
Europe, together with Spain and Malta, with less than 1.3 children per woman in
last place for birth rate, the lowest in the EU in 2021, equal to 6.8 births for
every thousand residents, against a European average of 9.1. The average age of
mothers at the birth of their first child in Italy is 33.1 years, against an EU
average which, albeit growing, stands at 29.4 years, as confirmed by Istat in 2021.

The structural consequences of demographic decline

The demographic decline is not without consequences, in fact, by changing the
ratio between people aged over 65 and young people of working age, the number of
active people decreases and therefore the possibility of supporting pensions and
social status for the entire population. States have therefore need to increase
the number of active people and this can only happen in a short period through
immigration. Therefore it becomes a structural necessity, justified and supported
by economic reasons and by the need of the production systems; that is why the
migratory problem must be tackled today from a new point of view, which must take
into account the growing and pressing demands of companies and country systems
that ask for a greater availability of manpower to face the needs of production
and the world of work. Today this need is there for all to see, it is enough to
refer to the pressing requests that come from the various production chains
which, short of the personnel necessary for production, demand a massive entry of
immigrants capable of satisfying their needs.
However, it is not a question of an undifferentiated request for manpower and
people, because the requests concern workers with specific professional skills,
capable of responding to the needs of the productive sectors. Therefore, a change
of pace in the organization of emigration would be necessary, providing for the
selection and preventive training of the people who are allowed to enter the
country, so that they can provide a functional contribution to the needs of the
productive world; all of this totally contrasts with the current structure of the
laws that regulate the migratory phenomenon since these are police laws that have
the main purpose of preventing and hindering emigration up to blocking it.
Furthermore, these laws are affected by the specific problems and characteristics
that migrations to different countries possess, as each country has its own
specificity. In order to analyze the complexity of the phenomenon, it is
necessary to examine the problems and characteristics of the various countries in
order to be able to realize which may be the most suitable solutions to the
overall problem, such as specific and common interventions.
For the sake of analysis, we will therefore proceed to divide the continent into
different areas in order to grasp the different specificities.

A first classification

We distinguish between a Spanish and Portuguese-speaking area characterized by
the existence of a large emigration basin towards Latin America and in any case
towards other continents which constitutes a reservoir for a possible return
emigration, made up of populations who speak the same language as the country and
are children of the same culture.
If this emigration were to take place - and to the extent that it already takes
place - it is a return migration which allows for an easy reintegration of the
migrants into the economic and social fabric of the country, which certainly
presents less difficulty when they come from countries of the same culture,
habits, language, religion and ethnicity. When this does not happen, integration
is certainly more difficult and presents specificities that we will examine in
the continuation of our analysis and the necessary integration tools become those
common to many countries.
In the same way we can speak of a return immigration as far as France is
concerned, which not only benefits from a colonial past which allows the country
to draw on a French-speaking basin, but has disseminated a presence with its own
culture and language of community linked to the mother country in vast areas of
the world. In fact, it is no coincidence that the country is the preferred
destination for much of the immigration from Africa and especially from North
Africa, so much so that migrants from this area today constitute a not
insignificant part of the citizens of the metropolitan area of France.
The same can be said and for the same reasons for England, which is also able to
draw population from numerous territories and which also has an exchange of
populations with Australia and New Zealand, as well as with the United States and
Canada. The vastness of its imperial domain and the resulting "linguistic
colonization" make it a favorite destination for many migrants. The migratory
phenomenon relating to the United Kingdom will be analyzed in its specificity
with specific criteria.
The case of the other European countries is still different. Germany has
implemented a migration policy which in the first phase was nourished by the
blood law, i.e. the law which allowed the return to Germany of those
German-speaking populations scattered throughout Eastern Europe and which in the
past had been the reason for the attempt to territorial expansion of the country.
In reality, since the end of the Second World War, Germany has gradually been
able to benefit from a return flow of German populations to the countries of
Eastern Europe and then, subsequently, after 1989, it has benefited from the
unification of the country which has allowed progressive expansion
of its population.
Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that Germany has remedied the demographic
crisis following the defeat in the Second World War by integrating its population
with a migratory flow from other European countries for work reasons, absorbing
workers from the most diverse parts; and in fact real enclaves have been created
on its territory such as the Turkish one in Rhur or in the city of Berlin, where
there is a vast Turkish community. This also happened for many Italian workers
who emigrated to Germany for work reasons.
Subsequently, in more recent years and above all after unification, the German
government has pursued a policy of expanding temporary and seasonal emigration
with the countries of the East, establishing almost stable relations which have
given rise to periodic migratory flows, with populations placed immediately
across the country's border, who used their work in Germany as seasonal
work.[1]When these conditions partially changed, Germany allowed the massive
entry of populations from the Middle East, implementing a preventive selection of
their professional skills and education, arranging literacy courses, distributing
new arrivals throughout the territory, organizing further training and job
placement activities, which explains the breadth, scope and success of the an
operation desired by Merkel which involved Syrian migrants on account in Germany
in a number close to one million thanks to an accurate prior preparation of this
massive entry of active working population.
Migrations to the countries of Northern Europe were instead mainly necessitated
by political persecutions. In the past years, these have mainly been refugees who
were fleeing persecution in their own countries, in search of spaces in which
human rights were guaranteed. To this flow, over time. an economic migration has
been added which, however, today is badly tolerated in these countries due to the
growing weight that the presence of this segment of the population exerts on the
needs of the welfare state.
Some European countries and in particular Poland, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia have
implemented a policy of systematic and scientific rejection of migration,
preferring to adopt policies to boost the birth rate by making their own, under a
more general profile, xenophobic-type security policies which allowed them to
push back the mass migration that has swept across Europe.
We cannot speak of a migration to the Balkans because this area was devastated by
the civil war and the population movements concerned the territorial
rearrangement of their distribution on the territory on the basis of ethnic and
linguistic criteria which in any case left unresolved in many cases the problems
of peaceful coexistence between similar populations. Therefore, we must not speak
of this area as an immigration area but instead as a migration area, mainly
towards other European countries. In this panorama, the case of Italy remains to
be analysed, to which it is necessary in this context to devote specific attention.
The same applies to countries such as Romania (Moldova, whose citizens often also
possess a Romanian passport) and Bulgaria, these countries of massive emigration
of a permanent nature in the West.

Migration policy in Italy

Italy has always been a country of emigration. Immediately after the unification
it was the inhabitants of the north of the country, residents of the poorest
areas who migrated to the United States and South America. Then it was the turn
of the inhabitants of the south, who provided the necessary arms for the
development of the United States and for emigration to the world by populating
the territories of Latin America, above all Argentina and Brazil. The post-war
period saw the recovery of the phenomenon with a migration mainly directed
towards European countries, in Germany, Belgium and France; significant is
symptomatic to understand the nature and purpose of this migratory flow the work
of Italian immigrants in the mines of Belgium, The turnaround occurred
plastically on August 8, 1991 when the 20,000 refugees from Vlora who were
fleeing from Albania landed in Bari. On that occasion, the town, and above all
the inhabitants of Puglia, mobilized to welcome the refugees, demonstrating that
they remembered the town's experience in migratory activity.
A lot of time has passed since then and with the collapse of the Eastern European
countries, migration to Italy has been enriched by the contribution coming from
these countries with a migration which, as far as some of them are concerned, has
reached decidedly considerable dimensions; this is the case of the one coming
from Romania which over the years has seen the Romanian community grow
in Italy until it becomes the largest in the country.
Alongside this flow of migrants has developed that coming from Africa, initially
from and through Libya and then from the other Maghreb countries and Egypt. To
this migration have been added migrants from the Far East, from the Middle East,
from Iraq, devastated by the wars unleashed by the United States, while
at the same time the flow coming from central Africa grew, as the African
population grew and at the same time the desertification of the territories
increased due to the change in the climate, the rural subsistence economy was
destroyed due to the growing exploitation by multinationals and economic
interventions of the former colonial states, which replaced the direct
exploitation of the territory's resources with the indirect one through and with
the support of the local elites.
As far as Italy is concerned, in 2000 the Bossi Fini law intervened to try to
contain the phenomenon, which closed the country to legal immigration and
established an absurd mechanism for entry into the country which required the
existence of a prior stipulated work contract in the migrant's country of origin
so that the migrant can legitimately migrate to the country and obtain the
necessary residence and work permits. In the face of this law, the result could
only be to make the phenomenon of illegal migration grow exponentially.
The law responded to the spread of increasingly xenophobic sentiments and
attitudes, fueled by the political propaganda especially of the League, which
intercepted the growing unease caused by competition on a precarious job market
lacking the protection of the underpaid work offered by migrants, forced by
clandestinity to find the minimum means of subsistence in undeclared work. The
League was thus able to intercept the fruits of a situation that it had helped to
create by deciding to exploit the migration problem politically to gain consensus
and lock up the workers of the most developed and richest part of the country,
fearful of seeing their own positions undermined . relative well-being from the
growing number of people looking for work under all conditions.
Alongside the structural and systemic shortcomings of the labor market in
general, the country was unprepared for the new phenomenon and did not grasp the
problems it brought with it; above all the forces of the left were unable to face
the problems posed by the integration into Italian society of people from other
cultures, possessing other habits and traditions in many ways incompatible with
those of the native population.
We are referring to the problems that the population from Islamic countries
brought with them, which is characterized by habits and customs that are
certainly distant from those of a part of the country, while the problems of
integration for the populations and migrants from Eastern Europe, which have the
element of differentiation above all in their religious affiliation, even if they
are still populations of mainly Orthodox Christian traditions. The
incontrovertible and deep-rooted presence of a component of the population of
Romanian origin, to which new Italian citizens are added, is a fact today. albeit
to a lesser extent from other Eastern European countries, also predominantly
Orthodox such as Moldavia Bulgaria, This completely new structural element of the
Italian population has not been the subject of attention as regards the need to
implement cultural and human integration policies necessary to make relations
between the different components of the country's population cohesive, with the
result of seeing to grow racist and xenophobic behaviors and to see the
integration process thwarted, which even public schools and voluntary
associations and only minimally the institutions have laboriously tried to
promote in order to allow the cohesion of the country.
The union organizations and certainly the political parties have often been missing.

Migration and asylum law

But alongside migration for economic reasons there is another which takes place
regardless of the will of the people involved and is the result of a necessary
and imposed choice. These are the populations and people forced to migrate in
order to enjoy the human rights of freedom not only economic, but social,
political, gender, ethnic and belonging to a social and human group.
The imperialist policies of recent years, the dictatorships that arose in
countries just free from colonial rule, the theocratic states formed and managed
by fundamentalist religious formations in the Islamic world, but not only, have
created a situation of strong and intense repression of social and human rights,
produced the loss of political rights, generated racial, gender, ethnic
persecutions, civil wars, subjection of entire peoples, which have produced a
widespread exodus of people and of fleeing men and women. This has resulted in
the exponential growth of requests for asylum and humanitarian reception which is
putting the right to asylum in crisis.
It should be noted that this is a human right, guaranteed by the 1951 Geneva
Convention, built on the status of refugees, drawn up on the basis of the United
Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights approved on 10
December 1948 by the General of the United Nations who affirmed the principle
that men, without distinction, should enjoy human (and women's) rights and
fundamental freedoms, and that they should be guaranteed the exercise of these
rights to the greatest extent possible and put finalized the statute of refugees
to be applied on the basis of the broadest meaning of the principle of solidarity.
The right to asylum is therefore guaranteed by many constitutions, including the
Italian one; from this derives a commitment to welcome refugees who cannot in any
way be equated - as the Italian government actually does - to migrants,
especially if they are irregular. In fact, they have the right to be welcomed
into the territory of the State, when their fundamental rights are denied. The
attribution to them of the status of illegal immigrants therefore constitutes a
clear violation of international law and that of the State, sanctioned by law in
the States that have signed the Geneva Convention, as did the Italian State, which,

Demographic crisis and emigration

The demographic crisis of the European territories is, therefore, an
incontrovertible fact, which cannot be remedied only through an increase in the
birth rate which takes a long time for obvious reasons. It follows that the
contribution that emigration can make to the problem cannot be avoided, but that
the problem must be tackled by developing a strategy to solve the problems
associated with integration. Not only that, but the combined effect of economic
emigration and the growing weight of refugees for humanitarian reasons as a
result of the application of the right of asylum, create many problems that would
need careful examination, adequate solutions from which the methods with which
the migration problem is addressed, as a whole, Policies of inclusion capable of
allowing for an albeit gradual integration of the newcomers into the host
societies would therefore be necessary, through the transmission of the values
that are proper to these societies; it would be appropriate to create structures
in which newcomers should receive the essential elements of inclusion in the
society through the illustration of the rights and duties that belong to
citizens; training and job placement policies would be needed; appropriate
planning of the settlement of newcomers in the territories, so that the new
presences are functional to the repopulation of areas now without inhabitants to
allow a better and more rational use of the territories and available spaces. The
abandonment of the territories and the lack of care and their maintenance
produces a progressive degradation that cannot be stemmed due to the ever
increasing rarefaction of the inhabitants in the area. The country from the new
population settlements, if implemented in a rational way, would therefore have a
lot to gain.
Instead, the choices made go in a completely different direction and we are
witnessing in all European countries a entrenchment in defensive positions and
the adoption of policies of exclusion which tend to keep the newcomers away,
through police measures which are so radical and cruel, when ferocious, in the
determination to violate any more natural relationship of solidarity. Proof of
this is the policies adopted by many countries, not least the one adopted by the
British government which intends to deport migrants via an airlift to Rwanda,
placing them in a life ban on entering the territories of the kingdom .
So much barbarism is just the litmus test that demonstrates the failure of social
inclusion policies and at the same time that Europe is an old continent, unable
to look to the future, obsessed by the nightmare of "ethnic replacement" and
destined to succumb in comparison with other areas of the world in terms of
development of society, rights, culture and quality of life.

[1]G. Cimbalo, Germany. The reasons for a system crisis. UCADI, Political Growth
Newsletter, Number 99 - October 2017
[2]The Orthodox question in Europe, Ucadi, Political Growth Newsletter, Number
162 - August 2022, The Orthodox we are talking about belong to Churches with a
strong identity and linked to traditional and regressive values. They resent the
fact that they have operated in closed and illiberal societies, they have a
strong connection to the state which they support with their ethical heritage in
matters of family, gender relations, the role of women, quality of life and
end-of-life issues, palliative care , etc. They tend to claim the role of
assistance through structures they manage and finance by the State, they promote
the confessional school and claim its funding, they ask for religious teaching in
public schools and the adaptation of its programs to the values they support .
Furthermore, the entry of countries with an Orthodox majority into the Union only
makes possible a "natural" convergence with those fundamentalist Catholic
components which are subversive of the Community aequis and which operate in
Poland, promoting strongly repressive legislation on the rights of minorities and
women on the 'termination of pregnancy and managing one's body; Hungary where
similar measures are adopted; of Croatia where the Catholic component has pushed
the Constitutional Court to promote the protection of the rights of the fetus; of
Slovakia which follows similar policies on family and gender relations. by
promoting strongly repressive legislation on the rights of minorities and women
on abortion and the management of one's body; Hungary where similar measures are
adopted; of Croatia where the Catholic component has pushed the Constitutional
Court to promote the protection of the rights of the fetus; of Slovakia which
follows similar policies on family and gender relations. by promoting strongly
repressive legislation on the rights of minorities and women on abortion and the
management of one's body; Hungary where similar measures are adopted; of Croatia
where the Catholic component has pushed the Constitutional Court to promote the
protection of the rights of the fetus; of Slovakia which follows similar policies
on family and gender relations.

The editorial staff

http://www.ucadi.org/2023/03/22/la-fortezza-europa/
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