Immigrants in Italy: At home, but still apart

By Elisabeth Rosenthal International Herald Tribune

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2005

SASSUOLO, Italy By almost all measures, members of the Qasim family are model citizens, the kind of people you would want as neighbors.

Zahi Qasim, a serious man in a V-neck sweater and slacks, is a machine factory foreman and a hard-working community leader. His wife, Khalwa Ghannam, is a teacher, fluent in three languages. Osama, 12, is popular, the top in his class. Ebullient Ali, 1, likes to crawl on the scrubbed tile floor of the living room - decorated with proverbs from the Koran - pursuing soccer balls under tables.

During a recent visit to this northern Italian industrial city just outside Modena, the Qasims were apologetic that they could not offer lunch, because they were fasting for Ramadan.

But in Italy, the Qasims, who were born in Palestine, are not citizens, even though they have spent half a hard-working lifetime here, raising a family. Italy's restrictive citizenship law allows immigrants to apply only after 10 years of residency, and it is filled with hard-to-meet requirements. Their children, both born in Italy, will be eligible only at age 18.

"We would love to be Italians," said Ghannam, 37, six months pregnant, dressed in a maroon hijab.

Their lives, though financially comfortable, are filled with little nasty reminders that they are not fully accepted in a country they have called home for 20 years.

After the London bombings this summer, Qasim, 42, was interrogated by the police, who also searched his home. He said he believes his cellphone is tapped. When friends from Turin came for Ramadan dinner, the police called to ask who they were and chastised the Qasims for not reporting them.

Qasim's efforts to buy a building for a Muslim Sunday school were blocked for two years by local leaders who objected that the site lacked parking.

Sassuolo's churches do not have parking lots, he noted.

"Sure it bothers me, because this is because I am a Muslim and they wouldn't do it to a European," he said. "We tell our children you have to work harder, to be the best in Italy, that hate gets us nowhere. This isn't our city and they have a right to control us if they want."

European leaders have been forced into uncomfortable introspection in past weeks, as cars and buildings burned in France, set afire by second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants who have never felt that Europe welcomed them. If it is happening in France, where most Muslims are at least citizens, could it happen here in Italy, in Germany or in England - or in any one of the more than half a dozen other European countries that have large Islamic underclasses.

"If we do not intervene seriously with social programs and with housing construction, we could soon have many Parises here," predicted Romano Prodi, a former president of the European Union and now an Italian opposition leader.

While it was a particular mix of alienation, unemployment and anger that set the suburbs of Paris ablaze, government policies and social attitudes in many European countries conspire to isolate, rather than integrate, immigrants in general - and Muslim immigrants in particular - even if they have lived in Europe for years.

Many Muslims say they have felt particularly vulnerable since the London bombings in July, as European governments intensify scrutiny of their communities to ferret out terrorists who may be hiding there. One suspect in the London bombings was discovered in Italy weeks later.

In Sassuolo, a city of 40,000, known for its ceramics factories, there have been no fires or violence. But there have certainly been a few figurative sparks and a good dose of tension since Muslims started pouring in a decade ago.

This summer, there were angry protests by immigrants and leftist labor groups after officials evicted the residents of a hulking green apartment building, Casa San Pietro, who were almost all Muslim immigrants from Morocco.

"There were drug dealers, the lights and drains didn't work anymore, it was falling apart," said Graziano Pattuzzi, the mayor of Sassuolo, explaining his decision. "Citizens said there were weapons in the building, and police refused to answer calls there, for fear of being pelted with rocks and bottles. The situation was untenable."

Another motivation, the mayor said, was to end the ghettoization of new immigrants and to promote integration. He said that many experts contend that districts should contain at most 4 percent immigrants. Higher concentrations only isolate immigrants from Italians and vice versa, he said.

About 9 percent of Sassuolo's population is non-Italian, and 68 percent of those foreigners are Muslims. A few apartment buildings had become inhabited almost entirely by people of Moroccan background, Pattuzzi said.

While protest leaders acknowledged that the neighborhood around Casa San Pietro was beset by petty crime, they said it had nothing to do with the residents, most of whom worked and even owned their apartments.

They said Sassuolo's government has helped to foster a climate of racism, or at least has done little to counteract it.

"We're at the point now that if a call center or a Pakistani restaurant opens, you've got a residents' association put together to protest against it," said Paolo Brini, a union leader who has helped organize the immigrants.

A residents' association in the city's Rometta neighborhood is trying to block the construction of a housing complex because it is likely to attract immigrants, Brini said. "It's a ticking social bomb."

Unlike France and Britain, whose Muslim immigrants started coming from former colonies many decades ago, those in Italy are relatively new. In Sassuolo, single men began to arrive 15 years ago, followed by their families in the past 7 to 10 years. Today, about half the schoolchildren in some neighborhoods are from immigrant families, Pattuzzi said.

It has been something of an uncomfortable adjustment. Ghannam said her son had endured teasing about his name, Osama, especially after Sept. 11, 2001. On the other hand, teachers have been understanding when the boy missed school on Muslim holy days, and one even called for advice on how to figure the direction of Mecca, so that Osama could pray during a school trip.

When the Qasims first moved into their apartment, on the third floor above a fruit store, their Italian neighbors were cold and hostile. But that has improved with time, they said.

Qasim said he did not participate in the protests over Casa San Pietro, believing that Muslims should mix more with the locals, no matter how difficult that is.

Many Italian families complain about the influx, linking Muslims with petty crime, Pattuzzi acknowledged. One of the reasons Casa San Pietro had turned into a ghetto, he said, was that many Italian landlords were unwilling to rent to Muslims.

"We've got a way to go to arrive at inclusion or integration, when it comes to work, culture, education and civic life," Pattuzzi said.

Still, many experts say that Sassuolo is not a potential tinderbox, like the Paris suburbs, because jobs are still relatively plentiful and "foreign" laborers are needed in these industrial towns.

"I don't want to be a cockeyed optimist, but one important difference is that there is a lot of unemployment" in Paris, said Antonio Oriente, a principal of one of Sassuolo's high schools. "That isn't a problem here."

Qasim said he has always been treated with respect at work, even given a place to pray five times a day, for example. At work, he said, he feels "like an Italian."

But Brini said Sassuolo's factories are expected to lay off 500 workers before too long, which could prove a flash point. Italian society has not been welcoming, offering platitudes about brotherhood and little else.

"We never thought of immigrants as people who would stay and live here for the future," said Renzo Guolo, a sociologist and Islam expert at the University of Padua, in Italy. "We just don't know how to build a society of different ethnic groups."

One important first step, he and others like Guolo say, would be to allow easier access to citizenship. "How can we expect them to follow the law, unless we give them something to make them feel part of the nation?" Guolo asked.

Italy is one of the few countries in Europe where birth does not confer citizenship. Although immigrants may apply after 10 years' proven legal residency, the state has no obligation to respond in a timely manner and the process often drags on, experts said.

But if Qasim is not Italian, then it is hard to know what he is, since he has no other place that he considers home. The family keeps a house in Ramallah, West Bank, and returns there for summer vacations, but Osama no longer fits in with the boys his age, who he said are mostly working part time. Qasim, who lived in Italy through the two intifadas, does not feel safe in Palestine. When Osama speaks Arabic with his parents, it is peppered with Italian.

"I will never lose my roots, but we have to live as Italians because it is our country now," said Qasim, who, though devout, has given up some of the more orthodox trappings of Islam, ones that he considers cultural, but not essential to religious practice.

For example, men and women mix and work side by side in the Islamic association that Qasim runs, even though they would be separated in the Middle East. "There are aspects of Islam that work in Palestine that don't work here," he said.

Many Muslims in Italy, including the Qasims, have followed the riots in France closely. Ezzedin Fatnassi, 41, a Tunisian-born imam of a prayer hall in another northern industrial city, Bassano del Grappa, opposes the violence, but said that "once it starts, one must try to understand the reason for it." He was shocked when his home was searched after the London bombings.

Like Qasim, he believes arrests and curfews have only aggravated the situation in France. "It's wrong to use police," Qasim said. "When you speak with people, you make them feel as though they're part of a larger society. If you make them feel marginalized, they'll put up a fight."

It is a lesson that many European countries are struggling to learn. Sassuolo's two Muslim prayer halls, home to thousands of worshipers, are makeshift plywood structures in old industrial spaces, forever fighting for their survival.

After two years of delays, Qasim was able to open his Islamic center - which includes a prayer hall and a weekend school - though he warns members to park far away, so as not to provoke the authorities.

When he talks to his son, Osama, after 20 years in Italy, Qasim still repeats the immigrants' mantra: ignore the slights, work harder than classmates. "Anyway, I tell him, Palestinians are used to being controlled: Just think what it is like in Ramallah."