Italy’s plan to deport Roma. Trump’s migrant children in cages. Both abhorrent — but liberals bear much of the blame

THE Italian government is contemplating deporting tens of thousands of Roma, or gypsies. The Trump administration put young children in cages after separating them from parents who illegally entered the United States.

Who dreamed 20 years ago that such shocking developments would take place in two apparently civilised countries? Almost no one. Not many saw this coming.

But while it’s right to deplore the actions of the Italian government and the Trump administration, I suggest they are acting as they do largely because their mainstream — and sometimes Leftist — predecessors constantly ignored people’s legitimate fears about uncontrolled mass immigration.

We are now reaping the whirlwind of years during which governments in the U.S. and Italy — as in most of Western Europe — failed to treat immigration as a serious issue, and in some cases took the view that the more, the merrier.

Persecution

What is happening in Italy is particularly disturbing because it carries echoes of the persecution of Roma by the dictator Benito Mussolini from the late Twenties until his fall from power in 1943.

And we shouldn’t forget that the Germans targeted gypsies (and Jews) with even more ruthlessness in the parts of Italy they controlled. The number of Roma murdered by the Nazis throughout Europe is disputed, but half a million is a reasonable guess.

So it’s impossible not to feel deeply uneasy after the announcement by the new far- Right interior minister, Matteo Salvini, of a ‘census’ of Italy’s large Roma community. Those found to have Italian nationality would ‘ unfortunately’ be allowed to stay while the rest will be expelled.

It’s true far-Right politicians have long been agitating about the Roma, of whom there are estimated to be between 100,000 and 180,000 in Italy. But they have been in no position to do much, though Silvio Berlusconi’s Right-wing government threatened a national registration in 2008. Now the far-Right is in power as half of a new populist coalition, it can set about expelling thousands of Roma. If this goes ahead, it will be an act of unprecedented callousness in modern Western Europe.

Yet the chilling truth is that such a mass expulsion would probably be welcomed by many Italian voters. Indeed, the popularity of Salvini and his League party has risen since the new government was formed a few weeks ago.

Why are so many Italians — generally a decent people — in favour of such extreme action? Because there is a widespread feeling that Rome and Brussels have ignored their misgivings about immigration over many years.

For one thing, when Romania joined the EU in 2007, a large number of Roma from that country (as well as many more non-Roma) were allowed to enter Italy, and compete for work in an economy where youth unemployment stood at almost a third.

In the past few years, of course, there has been an additional influx of hundreds of thousands of migrants from North Africa, which the centreLeft government in Rome, in power since 2013, was unwilling or unable to stem, though numbers have recently abated.

As for Brussels, it more or less washed its hands of any responsibility for helping the Italian government cope with what has become an immigration crisis.

Meanwhile many Italians — rightly, in my view — blamed Brussels and the political class in Rome for saddling them with the euro, which has had a cruelly stultifying effect on the Italian economy. Incredibly, it has barely grown since the country started to use the euro 19 years ago.

Is it any wonder that the Eurosceptics of the League party and the almost equally Eurosceptic Five Star Movement should have won more than half the popular vote in March’s general election? And why should we be surprised so many Italians support Salvini’s hard- line policies against the Roma?

In short, the mainstream parties, and in particular the centre- Left which was in power until its recent annihilation, turned an almost blind eye to people’s pardonable preoccupations.

Much as the Blair government did in Britain, you could say. One difference, though, was that parts of the Press in this country — not least the Mail — argued robustly that opposition to uncontrolled mass immigration was neither bigoted, nor racist.

Extremism

I don’t suggest Italian voters are all on the verge of embracing the far-Right. But only a fool would be sanguine about the extremism reawakening in that country — as it is stirring in Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovenia.

And, in every case, it is putting down roots in large measure because the traditional political parties have either failed to respond to people’s justifiable fears, or deliberately ignored them.

To some extent the same phenomenon is observable in the U.S., though it is more limited because of the strength of the country’s democratic institutions, and the sense of fairness of most American people.

But it is precisely because of those traditions that the sight of children crammed into cages by the immigration authorities is so appalling. It can’t be right to take them away from their parents, who have committed no worse crime than to enter America illegally.

As a result of the ‘ zero tolerance’ policy introduced in April by Jeff Sessions, President Trump’s attorneygeneral, all adults caught crossing the border illegally are being detained and prosecuted, rather than being released while awaiting proceedings, as happened under the Obama administration.

Even Republicans such as Ted Cruz, the conservative senator, from Texas are up in arms at the way this has been handled. Laura Bush, the former First Lady, has said that the separation of families is ‘cruel, immoral and breaks my heart’. She’s right.

Yesterday, it seemed President Trump had finally come to his senses — signing an executive order to end the family separations.

Though he has faced global vilification, the responsibility for incarcerating children cannot be laid entirely at Trump’s door. President Obama failed to come up with an effective policy for deterring illegal immigrants, and his policy of letting them go until they turned up in court (which they often didn’t) was obviously flawed.

Yet, at the same time, Obama was only too happy to deport those he could. Between 2009 and 2015, his administration removed more than 2.5 million people through immigration orders.

Not unreasonably, he and the Democratic Party have scoffed at Trump’s notion of a wall along the Mexican border, but they have been unable to come up with a better plan to limit immigration.

And that, as Trump’s election victory in 2016 showed, is what many Americans want. Much as the concerns of Europeans were disregarded by the EU and traditional parties, so the liberal- Left in the United States failed to take seriously the reasonable worries of ordinary people.

Inhumane

Trump did. The pity is that he should have betrayed the values of his country, and played into the hands of his enemies, by sanctioning inhumane treatment. Even his socalled ‘ core base’ is more opposed than favourable to the policy according to one poll, with 52 per cent against.

Surely the lesson arising from Italy and America is that open, moderate debate about the dangers of excessive immigration is far preferable to putting the issue on the back burner, and almost deliberately forgetting about it.

If nothing else, the EU referendum in Britain of nearly two years ago should have taught our political class that realistic controls on who comes into this country are what a majority of people want. The British are more sensible than other races, but I don’t think they will take kindly to having their wishes ignored.