A Testimony of Working with Migrants in Italy

"My husband is Italian. We were in the middle of it for several years - trying to help immigrants integrate. Don't even get me started on the futility of this Sisyphus endeavor.

First, they didn't want to integrate. Second, they arrive not knowing many of the simplest things - like how to utilize modern plumbing, personal grooming expectations, or common social exchanges. Third were larger issues like the expectations that Europe is Disneyland where everything is given to them, heavy-handed patriarchal social structures, unwillingness to learn Italian, contempt / disregard for public cleanliness / buildings. Essentially, they brought the ghetto with them, and rapidly transformed their areas into new ghettos. To the point where - and this is silly but typical - they would rip the tubs out of the bathrooms and place them on the balconies in full sight, where the women would fill the tubs by hand and everyone bathes out of doors. Garbage thrown everywhere, buildings somehow were torn and beaten - this was a mystery, but quite out of character for Italy where buildings are at least semi-permanent and cared for.
Hardest of all was that the concept of integration was incomprehensible to most. Their mentality is that of survival - lives focused only on living and eating for a day. Discussion about how to change or improve themselves just didn't register.
We developed a test to determine who we could best help: Here's one euro. It's yours. If you give it back to me you can come back tomorrow and I'll give you ten euros - no questions. Or you can keep the one today and I won't give you ten tomorrow. Only 8/100 elected the ten euro deal. We learned that this usually meant that survival mechanisms were so engrained in their mindset that they were beyond our limited ability to aid. If one can't conceive of tomorrow, one can't make plans and informed decisions. It was a distressing process.

Most fascinating is that the UN officials are well aware of this. Yet they keep declaring that this mass immigration must continue unabated. No ideology - not even postmodernism - can account for ignoring the level of destruction this is going to bring. It's difficult not to assume that most top EU politicians are paid agents of a foreign enemy - they cannot possibly be this ignorant.

Meanwhile all the papers write about is the abused immigrants, the bigoted citizens, etc ad nauseous."