A newly released survey of those who have migrated to Italy through legal channels has revealed that even immigrants are against mass illegal migration, with some even wanting to turn back refugees as well.
The study, which was conducted by the Regional Observatory for Integration and Multi-Ethnicity (ORIM), shows that 55.3 percent of immigrants would only welcome approved refugees while 12.2 percent would refuse to allow even recognised refugees into Italy and only 32.5 percent would advocate an open border policy, Il Giornale reports.
When broken down by country of origin, the statistics show legal Chinese migrants to be the most critical of mass migration with 27.4 percent saying they do not want any more illegal migrants or refugees, followed by legal Albanians at 16.7 percent. African migrants were the opposite, having the highest proportions of supporting open borders.
Security issues have been a major factor following the height of the migrant crisis in 2015, with the Heritage Foundation think tank finding that in Germany, the country that took in the most asylum seekers in 2015, over half of the terrorist suspects arrested since 2014 had been asylum seekers.
When asked about security issues around mass migration, 86.8 percent of the legal immigrants to Italy agreed that dangerous people could be hiding within the wave of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants.
Brothers of Italy party regional councillor Riccardo De Corato commented on the data, saying: “If we exclude the Senegalese most ethnicities are against this invasion, because often immigrants live in conditions of insecurity and unease, just like the Italians in the suburbs.”
The anti-mass migration attitudes of legal immigrants have exemplified in populist League senator Tony Chike Iwobi, a Nigerian-origin politician known as one of the populist party’s toughest critics of mass migration who became Italy’s first ever black senator earlier this year.
In other countries, legal migrants have expressed similar opinions, especially against criminal migrants like in the Swedish no-go suburb of Rinkeby where migrants advocated deporting entire families to cut crime in the area.
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