On the first of January, fifteen clandestine immigrants being held in the Ragusa centre for temporary permanence (cpt)*, a secure unit, received a visit from an envoy from the city’s police headquarters.
This would, in the normal course of events, probably be the first step in deportation. Instead the official came bearing papers that would recognise these 15 as European citizens, entitling them to roam freely in Italy.
Our immigrants in question were Romanian and Bulgarian citizens. Overnight they went from being locked up, in what are effectively prison camps*, to being card-carrying Europeans.
Liberated from the cpt, our proud Europeans, though, face an uphill struggle to general acceptance. In the same newspaper that reported the cpt story, there ran the following three headlines:
“Romanians no longer clandestine. There are over 400 thousand in Italy now”
“Milan also puts up a wall against the Rom [Roma gypsies]”
and “Security alert from the police ‘More and more gypsies in the North'”.
There are plenty of angles from which to cover the story of Romania and Bulgaria’s entry into the EU – business opportunities, culture, history, you name it. Instead, predictably, the newspapers have chosen to focus on gypsies and crime waves.
Credit where credit is due, though, La Repubblica does find a small space to quote sociologist Marzio Barbagli: “Just as happened in the two years following every regularisation, the number of crimes committed by Romanians and Bulgarians should diminish with their entry into the European Union”. 6 lines out of a two page spread – that should balance things out.
Hats off to Horatio Morpurgo who, in our very own Three Monkeys Online, casts the Romanian entry into Europe in a very different light.
*To label the CPT’s dotted around Italy as prison camps may seem excessive, but under three different administrations these camps have been off limits to journalists and impromptu inspections. They have been criticised by those inspectors who do manage to get a look in, and in certain cases the administrators have been accused of exploitation (both fiscal and physical) of those in their custody. An Espresso journalist took the extraordinary step of getting caught with a group of immigrants picked up entering Italy illegaly from Libya, just to get a peek inside the camps. His reportage was shocking, but neither Berlusconi or Prodi’s governments have taken steps to open the cpt’s up to transparent scrutiny.