Italy's Media Wrestle With Immigrant-Bashing

FLORENCE, Italy--It sounds fairly benign in English, but in Italian clandestino has become a term of hot debate. Clandestinos are the "illegals" in Italy’s immigration debate. It’s the word for the country’s million-plus immigrants without papers. The word comes loaded with negative connotations. Now, Italian media observers are asking if the word itself is not fanning flames of xenophobia.

Not that there is any lack of that in Italy. Robert Elliot, a British media observer based in Italy showed me a list of headlines that had appeared recently in Italian media. Headline writers have no problem putting the race and ethnicity of alleged perpetrators of crimes in their copy, no matter if the crime had anything to do with their race.

For example:

"Argues with girlfriend – Sets fire to divan – Handcuffs for an Egyptian"

Albanians ‘Lords’ of the drugs

or

Nine immigrants in abandoned farmhouses – only one was illegal

Some Italian journalists are worried about the stereotyping of immigrants by the media. The Italian National Press Federation and the National Council of Journalists Association have come up with a Charter of Rome, which is a code of conduct asking journalists to "exercise the highest care in dealing with information" regarding refugees, asylum seekers and victims of trafficking."

But it doesn’t go far enough, said Lorenzo Guadagnucci, a journalist fighting against racism in media and promoting multicultural media. He said that not enough journalists subscribe to it yet, and the Charter of Rome, which came out of work with the UNHCR, really focuses on asylum seekers rather than migrants in general.

And there is plenty of negative stereotyping of migrants even when they are not seeking asylum.

La Padania, the newspaper of an anti-immigrant right-wing political party had a front-page headline that proclaimed, "Not Enough Jobs – Send Them Back."

In the town of Prato, home to one of Italy’s largest Chinese communities, there is already a backlash. The Chinese, many of whom work in garment factories, and have businesses in both Italy and China, are being accused of unfair business practices. Anti-immigrant politicians have won seats on the city council with the help of some Chinese-bashing rhetoric.

Now the media are debating whether words like clandestino are adding fuel to the fire. Some Italians wonder if it would not be better to use the word “without papers” instead, said Anna Meli, of COSPE, a nonprofit that works on issues relating to migrants and the media.

There are about 4 million immigrants in Italy and another one million without papers. Some crossed into the country illegally. Many more have overstayed their visas.

But the immigration debate here is really fed by anxiety about a changing society. In Florence, home of Italy’s high renaissance, the epicenter of all that’s quintessentially Italian, migrants are everywhere. Bangladeshis sell chestnuts in the piazza. African immigrants tout guidebooks to gaggles of Japanese tourists. Romanian immigrants take care of Italy’s elderly. Italians see this but are not always ready to admit that their country is changing. Instead some cities pass regulations about Döner Kebab shops in the hopes of hiding the face of migration. Lurid stories of Roma gypsies kidnapping babies turn from urban legends into accepted wisdom.

In one famous story of Florence’s historic identity, when Pope Boniface VIII received the ambassadors of foreign states, they all turned out to be Florentine in origin. "You Florentines are the quintessence," pronounced the pope famously, a fact immortalized in a fresco in Florence’s Palazzo Vechhio.