If Ghali is a “real Italian”, as he sang in Sanremo, what are the 872 thousand children, children of immigrants, who go to school with our children? I’m nothing, I’m in limbo. Yesterday the data from the ISMU Foundation came out, which deals with migratory phenomena and is led by Gian Carlo Blangiardo, who is not a dangerous left-wing extremist, but a renowned statistician who trained at the Catholic University and led the Istat until last March, when he had to leave due to age limits (he is 75), despite the right-wing government wanting him in his place. In short, he is a moderate.
Blangiardo said yesterday, presenting the data, that citizenship rules need to be rethought because they were launched in 1992, when Italy was not a country of immigration. At the moment, the entire North of the world, and in particular Europe, has become a land of immigration. The cause of these increasingly massive flows is not only wars but climate change, which is making many areas of the planet uninhabitable due to heat and drought. There British researcher Gaia Vince says that “we live in a Nomadic Century”: in short, we will have to deal with these phenomena by not raising walls or confining people for months in those terrible places that are the CPR.
Returning to the children born in Italy to immigrant parents, let’s talk about a enormous phenomenon: over 10% of those enrolled in school. What’s the point of treating them like second-class people, with fewer rights? Blangiardo always says: “The real obstacle to be overcome is the inequality between Italians and foreigners. The passport you have in your pocket should make no difference.” Germany, France, Spain, Greece, Belgium and the Netherlands have less complicated ways of accessing citizenship than ours. Obviously there is a battle to be fought: the right is clearly against these issues, but what does the left do? It is not just a question of social justice but of vision. From understand what world we will inevitably live in and try to make it better. It’s about having “the courage of the future” (as Avvenire says today, which is not a Marxist-Leninist newspaper, but the newspaper of the episcopal conference).