This Reuters photo caught my attention. I'm not up on my Italian politics, but apparently they're having some debates about immigration, too. The logic of the posters is that if they were to let immigrants in, they could become second-class or even exiled citizens of their own home countries, just like the Native Americans did.
I hope I'm not the first to note the obvious fact that the analogy doesn't hold very well. Consider the superior technology and military organization of the European settlers in America and the both inadvertent and deliberate germ warfare, and you'll see that whoever is coming into Italy probably doesn't represent the same kind of threat (it certainly isn't true of immigrants to America).
But I expect the point is less political than cultural, i.e. that "native" Italians could be alienated from their corporate culture and values. At least, that seems to be the underlying anxiety in the American immigration debate. The degree of that anxiety, its blatant xenophobia and disturbing appropriation of a Native American history that Italian immigrants to America no doubt helped to write, is what surprised me.
At the risk of simplifying matters, I might suggest that it's precisely the antagonistic, paranoid and fearful tone of such rhetoric that puts one's culture more at risk than the presence of persons of another culture. It implies that the paranoid culture is weak and has no confidence in its own foundations, that it exists only because it holds a majority and not because it has any validity in the realm of human social and spiritual values. This is, admittedly, a similar argument as that made against people who worry that homosexual unions will undermine the family, but I don't think you have to agree with a particular policy on homosexual unions or immigration to still see the problem with the argument from fear.
In other words, if your problem is that your culture is weak enough already, then maybe you need to attend to that. Now, that could, I suppose, mean that you should attend to that first, as in prior to allowing immigrants in who might confuse the issue. But, at least in the States, most immigrants seem to come because they want to be a part of this country and what they recognize it stands for and offers, not because they want to colonize it and make it look like where they are trying to escape from. We might, then, take a cue from the immigrants and remember the values that are worthwhile in our culture and see how we could build on those to welcome the stranger who knocks on our door for help.
N.B. - it strikes me as absurd and tragic enough that I will not be able to conciliate those who find this post disagreeably too liberal by insisting that it is in fact meant to be rather Christian.
