Kudos to Italy for establishing an Office to facilitate the Integration of Immigrants.
That is typical of Italy's big heart and being "people" people.

I have several concerns, however:

If only 66% of the Immigrants are looking for work, what are the other 34% planning on doing?? Public Assistance??

And if there are jobs available, why are they not being offered to Italians that has an unemployment rate of 12.4 percent.

In Italy unemployment ranges from less than 3 per cent in some provinces of the north-east, to more than 30 per cent in the south.

Please don't tell me that Italians will not take the low paying jobs. Statistics on poverty in Italy for the year 1998 were recently released. According to the report there were 2,558,000 poor families in Italy last year.

This figure translates to 7,432,000 poor people, or 13 percent of the population. ISTAT, the organisation releasing the data, defines the poverty line as a monthly combined income of slightly less than 1,500,000 lire (about $800) for two people.

Another 8 percent of the population lives barely above the poverty line. About 5 percent of the Italian poor live in conditions of “absolute poverty”, with a combined monthly income of about 1,000,000 lire (a little more than $500).

The geographic distribution of poverty is very uneven. In the richer northern part of the country, 5.7 percent of families are poor. In the central region the figure climbs to 7.5 percent. It is in the economically depressed South, however, that the figure soars to 23.2 percent. Moreover, an astounding 65 percent of all families in the South are considered “at risk”.

On July 14 the head of the Italian government, Massimo D'Alema, visited Naples, perhaps the most important southern city. Try as he might, D'Alema could not avoid manifestations of the misery and inequality.

Agenzia Giornalistica Italia
On behalf of the Italian Prime Minister's office

(AGI) - Rome, Italy, Nov. 16 - It is called the Anti-Racial Discrimination National Office (UNAR), with a free multilingual contact centre (800901010) to manage reports, as well as supplying immediate help to those who contact it in order to defeat all forms of racism and to favour the process of integration and cohabitation between different ethnicities.

The Equal Opportunities Minister, Stefania Prestigiacomo, started UNAR's activities against racism in the presence of Cabinet under secretary Gianni Letta, as well as Rome mayor Walter Veltroni.

The office has four goals: preventing discrimination phenomena; promotion of positive actions; removal of discriminatory conduct; monitoring and verification activities.

The immigration phenomenon can be summed up in this way: on December 31, 2003, Italy had 2.2 to 2.6 million immigrants, or 4.5 percent of the population, compared to 2.8 percent in 2001.

Their makeup is varied: 198 countries are represented, and half of the immigrants come from Eastern European and Balkan countries, with the highest number represented by Romanians (239,000), followed by Albanians (233,000). A fourth of the foreign population comes from Africa, followed by Asia and the Americas.

But the most important figure is that 66 percent of foreign people "are here for work reasons, so much so that the majority of immigrants are in the north (half of the total), compared to the south, which houses only 10.5 percent of the immigrant population," said Prestigiacomo.

These figures show the "challenge of integration, a current challenge which we face with more frequency." And if migratory flows cannot be impeded ("Not even the Bossi-Fini was able to do it," said Veltroni), a complete democracy must equip itself for social integration.

"We have to ask whether in Italy there is a real problem of racial discrimination: there are cases of racial discrimination, as we can ready in the quarterly report presented by the committee against discrimination," said Prestigiacomo.

Phenomena connected to anti-Semitism and Islam-phobia are presented in Italy, "nourished by prejudice against minorities present in the country: xenophobic graffiti, Swastikas, statements of intolerance, letters and text messages containing threats, and so on," continued Prestigiacomo.

And so the need was felt to construct the new office and present it officially at the same time as the arrival of the Truck Tour in Italy entitled "For diversity against discrimination".

The initiative of the Equal Opportunities Ministry was adequately sponsored by the Cabinet under secretary Gianni Letta, according to whom the "the effort we have to make is to unite many diversities."

The principles on racial discrimination and its repression are already contained in the European Charter. The Ministry's initiative was approved by the mayor of Rome. "The initiative is going in the right direction, because it interprets the feelings of all Italians who remember those who theorised racial superiority," said Veltroni.

And Rome, today it is "a city that integrates and does not separates, that looks for integration and not discrimination, a city willing to welcome immigrants and integrate them socially." There are 320,000 immigrants in the capital, 53.8 percent of whom are women, with 31,000 minors, and 18,000 in Roman schools.

"The Bossi-Fini law was not able to solve the problem: illegal immigrants continued coming. Until they are immigrants who are looking for work, they will be welcomed.

If then there is a problem of public order, it should be faced harshly," said Veltroni. Walls and barriers cannot be used to face migratory flows. "In Rome, there are no ethnic quarter, because these are an antechamber to racism: we have to work to integrate people of different ethnicities into our community."