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Racism can become part of a nation in a very short time, as seen clearly in the Italy of those days. It happens simply with the rapid spread of intolerance through the political world and the media. Few years of massive propaganda against immigrants were enough to make racism commonplace and normal . It's the case then to remember the huge differences between reality and prejudices which have become common knowledge.

In reality, immigration is for the host country a huge economic benefit, plus an advantage not without guilt, because based on the indiscriminate exploitation of immigrant labor. Immigration does not have any real effect on crime rates , which in Italy is in fact in a slight decline in recent years. In reality immigrants who are victims of crimes by Italian citizens are more numerous than the Italian victims of crimes by foreigners, even if nobody says it. And in any case, any rate of crime in a particular ethnic group is certainly not a justification for racism. Firstly, because the individual faults are not collective guilt. To blame a collective people for individual actions is fascism, persecution, racism. Second, because for every immigrant who has committed a crime there are 99 living and working honestly, of which no one speaks. And many of them receive an unfair treatment by the Italian government that they did nothing to deserve. 
The most persecuted are certainly the Roma: in our country the population of gypsy origin exceeds 100,000 people, but most of them are Sinti, the western gypsies who live in Italy since 1400 and are fully integrated, or Roma originating from Eastern Europe living in Italy since decades. The "gypsies" who actually live in camps and are the preferred targets of racism are only 12,000, according to a census of our current government . Too few to commit all the crimes attributed to them. The information speaks of the nomads only about episodes of crime or alleged abductions of children (who have always been proven false claims) but doesn't say that most of them actually live normally and those who cannot undergo a continue persecution from local italian institutions, instead of the aid that should be eligible for special European Union laws. Cities and the Italian government continues to demolish their camps, to deport them from one place to another, despite numerous complaints received for this behavior by the EU and the UN. Recently, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has visited our country , but because she had nothing flattering to say about this topic, the Italian media have thought to not communicate to the public this news. 
A state with 60 million people could integrate very easily just over 10,000 people, taking away their poverty and emargination. Italy, however, prefer to persecute them . And you cannot send children to school and build a future for them if a state requires you to live in temporary camps that are regularly demolished. And if a child dies from a fire in a camps where people have to warm up in makeshift shelters, this is not an accident, but the result of displacement and persecution. 
But the way we treat the Roma is only a small part of the growth of racism in Italy. The Court of Cassation ruled that an immigrant can be expelled even if in our country has a normal family with children going to school .And in Rome a group of people has devastated a bar frequented by Bengali immigrants, injuring 14 people. 
Are the various aspects of racism that goes on day after day in silence and indifference of the majority of the media. Exactly the media are the key to this situation. If in Italy there are almost 5 million immigrants but when most newspaper and television for years has spoken only of the 0.1% of them who committed a crime, of course the public perception of immigration can not be good . It's a perfect example of incorrect information, the part is presented as a representation of the whole even if do not really represents it. 
Immigrants are also people living honestly in Italy for years who are imprisoned, innocent, in Identification and Expulsion Centres, boys fleeing the war who die trying to cross our borders, refugees who are denied the right to asylum in violation of international treaties, children who cannot go to school in their district or in the town where they live because of another absurd and racially discriminatory law imposing a maximum of "foreigners" for class, those exposed to be imprisoned or expelled when they lose their job even if they have done absolutely nothing wrong, the huge bureaucratic difficulties to renew the residence permit or obtain citizenship even when they have full rights. 
All news that never go on television, while the mayor of Milan, a major Italian cities, calls for house to house searches without a warrant of the court, on the Nazi model. The law is not equal for all in Berlusconi's ruled Italy. There is a law for His Majesty the Prime Minister ordained by the people and television, and for his close friends, that may violate any laws without fear of consequences. Then there is the law for ordinary citizens, to whom is never granted leniency. And finally, to persecute honest immigrants there are the racial laws that violate the Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but because television does not say that, Italy does not know.

Francesco Defferrari

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