Italy has long held the reputation of being a nation of emigrants, and, in contrast to many of its European neighbours, has had little familiarity with the problems and responsibilities of hosting immigrant flows. Governmental inexperience in setting up legal provisions and integration policies, the incomplete nature of the measures undertaken and the excessively bureaucratic mechanisms involved in applying them has created a situation of great uncertainty both on the part of the host nation and for the immigrants themselves.

Geographic proximity to two of the post-communist era’s worst trouble zones – the former Yugoslavia and Albania – has made Italy a first safe haven, though rarely the ultimate goal, for many refugees fleeing their homeland in the hope of a better life in the West. The crises in these areas have been severe and prolonged: according to the UN High Commission for Refugees, war and civil war in Croatia and Bosnia had created 2.2 million refugees by November 1992, of whom 566,000, or 28 percent, were outside the borders of the former Yugoslav state. Seventeen thousand were estimated to be living in Italy at that time.¹

From 1990 to1996, about half a million Albanians, or one in seven of the total population, are thought to have left their native country. By far the greatest number – an estimated 300,000 – have taken up residence in Greece.²

There have been settlements of Albanians in Southern Italy since the fifteenth century, and towns such as Piana degli Albanesi in Sicily, and San Demetrio Corone in Calabria still retain a strong cultural and religious link with the home country. In recent times, there have been two major waves of immigration, the first in the spring and summer of 1991, when the last surviving Communist regime in Europe collapsed, and the second in 1997, in the wake of the civil unrest caused by the collapse of the fraudulent pyramid banks into which between a third and a half of the Albanian population had invested. The total number of Albanians to arrive on Italian shores during the 1990s has not been officially quantified, but could be between 150,000 and 200,000.

The choice of Italy as primary destination for Albanians in flight has been weighted primarily by pragmatic considerations: Vlora, Albania’s second port, lies only 74 kms from the Apulian coast. A high proportion of Albanians speak and understand some Italian, mainly because Italian television is easily picked up, especially in the south of the country. Images of the affluent West as filtered through the Italian media have been an important cultural influence on Albania, while daily Italian quiz shows offering competitors the chance to win large cash prizes have reinforced the attraction of a country where money can be made without effort.

It is a commonplace, in and outside Western European law enforcement circles, that Italy is lax over immigration. The eastern seaboard of its 8,000 kilometre long coastline has a reputation for permeability and for long-established patterns of smuggling (see Section 4.2). In April 1993, France’s Minister for European Affairs complained about Italy’s inability to strengthen border controls.³ In 1995, some 500 illegal immigrants who had crossed into other EU countries from Italy during the previous few months were ‘handed back’ as an indication of responsibility.⁴ Italy’s admission to the Schengen group of countries was delayed because of the absence of a computerised recording system for undesirables and suspected criminals and, as a related concern, because of the perceived inadequacy of measures against illegal immigration.⁵

Throughout the 1990s, Italy has been under considerable pressure to catch up with EU ‘fast stream’ members, a process which has involved stringent measures of higher taxation and reduced public spending against a background of high levels of unemployment and social tensions caused by discrepancies between economic growth rates in the north and the south. These pressures have led the instinctively hospitable Italians to overreact to the influx of immigrants and at times to experience it as a barely tolerable burden on an already over-stretched economy. For some sectors of the population, immigrants have served as a symbolic scapegoat.

In fact, Italy’s official immigration levels are considerably lower than those of its European neighbours and represented around 2.2 percent of the total population in 1997, compared to an EU average of about 5 percent.⁶ Moreover, despite being a first port of call for many refugees, the data on requests for asylum show that comparatively few wish to remain – in 1997 there were 1,869 requests (of which only 342 were granted) compared to 104,400 received by Germany and 40,600 by the UK. With a noticeable exception in 1991, when the so-called ‘invasion of boat people’ from Albania drove the number of asylum seekers to 26,472 (only 824 permits were granted at that time)⁷, in the 1991–1996 period there has been an average of 1,000 asylum requests per annum in Italy. Requests have increased since, up to 3,057 (62.5 percent from Kurdish immigrants) in the first nine months of 1998.

The key to understanding the widespread fears about immigration in Italy lies in the discrepancy between the official number of immigrants who are legally resident and employed, and the estimates of the number illegally resident and whose employment options are presumed to be limited to work in the underground or informal economy or criminal activities. The lack of knowledge of the actual size of the immigrant population and unsubstantiated rumours that there could be up to five times as many illegal as legal immigrants has caused an exaggerated sense of panic about a potential ‘criminal invasion’.. These fears, accompanied by several manifestations (individual and collective) of racism, reached unprecedented levels during the summer of 1997 as a result of some isolated episodes of violence, blamed by Italian public opinion on Albanian illegal immigrants, even in instances in which the police were unable to identify the perpetrators of the criminal actions. Moreover, the climate of public outrage was fuelled by the controversies surrounding the ‘disappearance’ of thousands of Albanians (3,000 according to some sources, 9,000 according to others) from the refugee camps in Italy to which they had been assigned, and the obvious impossibility of repatriating all refugees as many of those who were still in the camps refused to move.

According to a survey carried out in 1996 on behalf of the business association Confcommercio,⁸ seven Italians out of ten, including businessmen and women, believed that the problem of non-EU immigration was making criminality worse. Eight out of ten police officers and magistrates questioned (the individuals presumed to be most informed about the real situation) thought that the increase in immigration was linked to the spread of organised crime.

The Confcommercio poll in all its associate bodies nation-wide showed that 94 percent of those interviewed felt immigrants had aggravated the problem of criminality. At the top of the list of activities in which they felt this to be true was prostitution (28 percent), followed by drug dealing (25.6 percent), micro-criminality (18.4 percent), racketeering (3.2 percent) and unregistered work (2.4 percent).

A survey undertaken by ‘La Sapienza’ University in Rome indicated that, in 1996, 11 immigrants died in Italy from assault – an average of almost one every three days – although it could not be determined how many of these acts of aggression were unequivocally motivated by xenophobia. In 1994, there were 91 such deaths, in 1995, 99. Women were more often victims of violence than men. Rome clearly emerged as the most violent city for immigrants, with 23.8 percent of attacks, followed by Milan (7.2 percent) and Turin (5.6 percent). The data were obtained from the local news pages of 18 daily newspapers in Italy’s 20 regions, and are therefore almost certainly an underestimate, given that news reports would not necessarily cover deaths which occurred several days after an attack.⁹

Although the survey was based on press reports rather than hard data, the results are consistent with official figures from the ONX (National Observatory on Xenophobia), which gave a total of 405 attacks against immigrants in 1996. ONX data also confirm the geographic distribution: Latium is the most violent region (107 cases in Rome alone) with 39 percent of charged incidents as compared to 34 percent for the central and northern regions, respectively, and 27 percent for the south. The percentage of victims from Africa is decreasing, while there are more and more attacks against immigrants from Eastern Europe.

Italian attitudes towards Albanian immigrants underwent a change between the first and second wave of arrivals in 1991, and the most recent waves in 1997 and in 1998. Refugees arriving in the spring of 1991 were greeted with warmth by the population of the Salento area of Apulia, which quickly mobilised to provide food, clothing and hospitality. However, rejection began in the month of August when immigrants started to arrive in boatloads and the situation was perceived as getting out of hand.¹⁰ Red Cross workers in the Milan area charged that while they had been ‘overwhelmed’ with offers of help for Albanian refugees in 1991, it was difficult to find volunteers in 1997.¹¹ The first nation-wide opinion poll conducted in the spring of 1997 showed that 56 percent of the population was ‘worried’ by the arrival of so many Albanians. Only half the respondents said they would not mind if a refugee camp were set up in their town.¹²

Political parties have been divided over the issue: hesitation and some confusion within the generally benevolent centre–left government has been offset by the extreme hostility demonstrated by former and present exponents of the Northern League. Political divisions seem to be reflected in an ambiguous response from the general public, such that while most Italians are sympathetic to the plight of individuals, the prospect of arrivals en masse has instilled a sense of panic and rejection. The fact that so many of the Albanians are young and male has aroused fears of delinquent hordes roaming the streets, prompting one commentator to observe, somewhat ironically, ‘A population of 57 million well-off people seems to have confused ten thousand Albanians with the invasion of the Visigoths’.¹³ Analysts of the press coverage given to the Albanian crisis of 1997 blame the national media for creating a sense of generalised alarm and believe that without any hard supporting data, selective news gathering ‘directed at the quest for the Albanian criminal’¹⁴ has served to blur the boundary between marginalisation and criminalisation. It has been suggested that the statement ‘Albanian equals criminal’ is the result of a ‘TV bombardment’ which fixes the haggard, miserable faces of the refugees as the dominant image in the minds of the Italian viewers – ‘hard, masculine features usually associated with country people; hollow eyes dazed with fatigue; uncouth, overwrought faces, their expressions intensified by the odyssey of the previous days’.¹⁵

Detailed analysis of the impact of news from Albania (January–April 1997) is the subject of a recent academic report.¹⁶ Examining some of the major Italian newspapers and magazines, the authors suggest that one can distinguish an ‘Albanian discourse’ which, conveyed by certain words and images, ‘invaded’ the press with up to 8,000 articles in the four-month period.

These images have caused a latent vein of xenophobia to emerge within sectors of the press and the political classes. Giorgio Bocca, a respected writer and World War II partisan, warned of the need ‘for our own sake not only that of the Albanians, to maintain a respect for the individual, to reject the collective and global ‘demonisations’ from which massacres and persecutions are born and a neighbour is transformed into an enemy to be obliterated without distinction’.¹⁷

The August 1998 Planning Document on Immigration Policy affirms that ‘a superficial knowledge of the different components of the immigrant population in Italy leads public opinion to be more sensitive to negative aspects of migration (especially episodes of deviancy and crime) than to ‘normal’ situations of socio-economic integration’.¹⁸ More in-depth knowledge is required, in appreciation of the fact that statistical data may be misleading if interpreted out of context and with no further explanation. This may happen with estimates of irregular immigrants and percentages of criminals among the immigrant population, as will be highlighted in the following paragraphs.