Seven out of 10 Italians believe there are too many migrants in their country, and some 67 per cent think “a strong leader is needed to defend the people”, according to a new poll.
The research was carried out by the Jewish Contemporary Documentation Centre (CDEC) in Milan in collaboration with well-known polling agency IPSOS, reports the ANSA news service.
A surprising 43 per cent also believe migrants are “stealing” jobs from Italian locals — perhaps referring to legal migrants from elsewhere in the European Union rather than illegal migrants from North Africa and the Middle East, who tend not to find work even in the comparatively healthy economies of Northern Europe.
For example, fewer than 500 of the 163,000 migrants who lodged asylum claims in Sweden in 2015 were reported as having found employment as of June 2016, and the German stock market’s top 30 firms only had only found positions for just 54 migrants — in a workforce with a combined strength of four million.
Italy took over as the number one destination for illegal migrants to Europe from impoverished Greece — a country of only a little over 10 million people which saw an influx of over one million migrants between January 2015 and March 2016, completely overwhelming some of its smaller islands — after the EU negotiated a partially successful deal with the Islamist government in neighbouring Turkey to begin monitoring the Eastern Mediterranean route.
The Southern Mediterranean Route — to Italy via Libya — was subsequently cultivated by pro-migration “charities” as well as people-smugglers, which were later accused of working in tandem by the Italian authorities, which produced evidence that at least one so-called rescue ship was accepting direct transfers from smuggler boats.
The migrant crisis has put enormous strain on Italy’s city infrastructure, police forces, and tourism industry.
The mayor of Rome wrote to the country’s interior ministry to say that the ancient capital was too crowded with migrants to take any more as long ago as August 2015, and the city experienced riots when police tried to clear around a hundred of them who had set up an illegal camp in a public square in August 2017.
Sicily, which along with tiny Lampedusa, is one of the major points of arrival for migrants in Italy ans has slid into a state of some disorder, with rival Nigerian gangs butchering each other with machetes, collaborating with the Mafia, transporting heroin, and trafficking thousands of African prostitutes who are petrified into submission by terrifying “voodoo rites“.
Tourism elsewhere in the country has been hurt by crime of a more pedestrian — if still horrible — nature, with potential holidaymakers shocked by the recent story of a Polish couple and a Peruvian transwoman who were gang-raped by migrant men on a popular beach in Rimini.