Immigration

From Since the nineties Italy has been experiencing a strong growth of immigrants from different areas of the world. After the fall of the Berlin wall, dramatic and radical political changes took places in almost all the eastern European eastern countries. Albania was one of them: when the communist government was overturned overthrown, many people tried to escape as refuges into the near countries such as Italy and Greece. It was probably the first time in my life that I heard the news talking about the “invasion” of immigrants. This phenomenon, often exaggerated by media with adjectives likes “exceptional, huge, unsustainable, etc”. It has repeated several times in the following years. Italy had to deal with more and more frequent and intense of waves of immigration. Some political parties have tried to exploit this situation to gather more votes during elections and to justify the high level of unemployment that has always characterized my country. Regarding this last point, I believe that the opposite is true. Immigrants do jobs that most Italian people don’t want to do because they are not well paid or because they are considered humiliating or too hard (harvesting tomatoes is just an example). Immigrants pay taxes and, in this way, they avoid the collapse of our welfare system due to a reduced number of working people.