Immigrants not only have virtually nothing to do with the crisis in banking, the slow growth of the economy, or the persistently high numbers of unemployed, they are a solution to a looming "apocalypse": Italy's extremely low birth rate, the lowest in the world after Japan.
Italian women give birth to 1.39 children on average, but the replacement ratio for the developed world is 2.1. "If we carry on as we are and fail to reverse the trend, there will be fewer than 350,000 births in 10 year's time, 30 percent less than in 2010 -- an apocalypse," says Italian Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin. "In five years we have lost more than 66,000 births [per year]" Lorenzin told La Republica, or a city the size of Siena. "If we link this to the increasingly old and chronically ill people, we have a picture of a moribund country."
A major obstacle to increased birth rate is that Italy has the second lowest percentage of women in the workforce in the EU, only 37 percent. The EU average is between 67 percent and 70 percent. An 80-euro a month baby bonus has flopped because many schools let out at noon and childcare is expensive.
The problem is EU-wide, where the average replacement ratio is only 1.58. The Berlin Institute for Population and Development estimated that Germany would need at least 500,000 immigrants a year for the next 35 years to keep pensions and social services at their current levels.
But Lorenzin's warning is a cry in the wilderness.
Immigrants are a "social bomb that is ready to explode," says former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose rightwing Forza Italia Party is in coalition with the xenophobic Northern League and the fascist Brothers of Italy. The coalition is currently running in first place, with about 36 percent of the vote. "All these migrants live off of trickery and crime," he told Canale 5, a station he owns.
Not to be outdone by Berlusconi, Giogia Meloni of the Brothers calls for a "naval blockade" and "trenches." Meloni launched her campaign for prime minister in Benito Mussolini's city of Latina, and the late dictator's granddaughter is a party candidate.
Matteo Salvini, the Northern League's candidate for prime minister, kicks it up a notch: immigrants, he says, bring "chaos, anger, drug dealing, thefts, rape and violence," and pose a threat to "the white race."
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