Il volantino (in  inglese ) con cui la nostra organizzazione ha preparato ed è intervenuta nella manifestazione indetta dal Comitato Immigrati a Roma per il 1° ottobre 2006

Prodi has announced that his government has the intention of taking some new steps in the matter of immigration. The most important innovations would be the possibility of obtaining the citizenship after 5 years (instead of 10 years) and the acknowledgement - under certain conditions - of citizenship for the immigrants’ children, if the children are born in Italy. In other words, the government has made some promises that seem to meet the immigrant workers’ legitimate desires.

Is it really as it appears? Is the Prodi government a “friend” of the immigrants? Can we trust in it?

We think and clearly say NO! For a lot of reasons:

• The experience of other countries, like France and Great Britain, where these regulations have been being in force for a long time, shows that the immigrants and their children are considered and treated anyway as workers and citizens of second or third class.
• The Italian government, as well as the media, is fully responsible of the campaign of falsehood and lies that in different manners has been hitting for a long time all the immigrants. The government and the media never miss the opportunity of saying that “the Islamics are bloody barbarians”, that “the Rumanians are violent criminals”, that “the Albanians are thieves”, etc. With this campaign, they aim to create in the society a climate of hate and racism, to terrify all the immigrant workers and to keep Italian workers separated and far away from immigrants, in order to weaken all the working class.
• In these months, tens of ships bringing aboard hundreds of men and women from Africa and Asia have been made to sink off the Italian coasts, originating true slaughters. The Italian authorities call them “accidents”. But just these authorities are among the main responsibles for these slaughters. Indeed, if so many peoples are forced to afford such a dangerous trip in the sea, this is due to the misery and the desperation that just the continuous political, economical and military actions of Italy, Europe and all the Western countries are bringing to the South and the East of the World.

The truth is that the policy of the Prodi government is a “stick-and-carrot” policy. The stick is always the same: expulsions, blackmail, deny of stay-permit, racism and repression. The carrot is represented by the promise of new regulations, and, as well as the stick, is used to bend the immigrants’ back. In fact, to hope to be part of the restrict number of those who could obtain the citizenship, the immigrants not only will have to demonstrate to have been “regularly” working for at least 5 years, but above all they will also have to demonstrate their “good behaviour” towards the Italian institutions.

In other words, the immigrants will be asked for:

• Taking a distance from every form of mobilization and collective organization: that is, from the only thing that in these years has allowed immigrant workers to somehow defend themselves from the racism and the abuses of the institutions and the Parliament.
• Actively supporting the policy of plunder, robbery and war that the Western countries (with Italy in the first line) are daily leading against Middle West, Africa, Asia, East Europe and Latin America. In other words, the immigrants will be asked for siding against their own peoples and against all the resistance fights of their own peoples.

To really obtain one’s rights, it is necessary not to deceive oneself about the Prodi government, but, on the contrary, to resolutely take again the way of the organization and of the common fight, beyond the differences of religion, language and nationality.