In those days Italy is showing a cruel reality to everyone: in a town called Rosarno, in Southern Italy, there have been riots involving African immigrants and anti-immigrant people that caused many injured people. Immigrants decided to rise against exploitation and the inhuman living conditions they experience.
What is happening in Rosarno is only one of the most concrete examples of what xenophobia and racism are.
Rosarno is a town situated in Calabria, a region persecuted by mafia (in this case called “'ndrangheta”), where immigrant people are considered like slaves, living in inhuman conditions in abandoned factories and buildings with no running water or electricity. Once again the Italian government answered to the “immigration problem” with repressive laws or with meaningless measures to protect our “safety”.
The immigration issue is also addressed by the government in the field of education. Last week the Italian Minister of Education, Mariastella Gelmini, introduced new measures regarding public schools. She invited schools to form classes with no more than 30% of foreigner students in order to foster an “innovative and intercultural education”. Following those measures, in areas with a strong presence of migrants, foreign pupils will be obliged to move to other schools. Those measures follow former proposals to introduce the so-called “bridge-classes”: at the beginning of their schooling path, migrant pupils would go to different classes from Italian peers, in order to achieve “better integration”.
UDS strongly oppose those measures that threaten the right to education and create differences between Italian and foreign pupils. UDS strives to create a truly intercultural society, where migrants could became Italian citizens and where migrant pupils are considered as valuable resources for their Italian peers who will have the opportunity to get to know new cultures and new ways of thinking and to become more open-minded and tolerant.
