Italians aren’t all that big on immigrants these days. Canada would probably be the better option, since I can’t imagine her expatriating would make her any less annoying:
A class of primary school children in Naples has shocked Italy after submitting homework which supported the burning of gypsy camps. Teachers at the school had set the children the task of explaining how they felt about the persecution of the gypsies. The response was an alarming series of drawings and essays, many of which supported the vigilante action…. The attacks and essays come against a backdrop of growing intolerance to immigrants, fuelled by hard-line partners in the new government of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi….
Italy’s statistics agency, ISTAT, fanned the fires of anti-immigrant feeling yesterday by releasing numbers showing that immigrants are responsible for more than a third of the murders committed last year. ISTAT said foreigners had committed 70 per cent of all petty theft, 39 per cent of the sexual offences and 36 per cent of the murders.
As I wrote a few years ago, what’s happening in southern Italy will soon be happening elsewhere in Europe. Nationality is not merely an abstract concept there as it is in the United States. And the children are correct, because when a corrupt government not only refuses to recognize the will of the people but instead elects to repeatedly offend it, the people have no choice but to take force into their own hands.
And as students of history will recall, southern Italians have a long and rather famous tradition of dealing firmly with unwanted outsiders.