Immigration Crackdown or Race War?

Cattlecars anyone? When I visited Italy, our guide had a lot of warnings about the Gypsies, a word that stood for pickpockets, we soon found out. From Rorschach yesterday this news: those gypsies are being identified with fingerprinting, presaging deportations.

Fingerprint the lot of them: the idea had the satisfying smack of firm government. Now the Italian government was doing something tough; something long overdue.

The Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, a leader of the rabble-rousing Northern League – close allies of Silvio Berlusconi on the government benches – has explained his next step in his assault on the "emergenza di sicurezza", the "security emergency": fingerprinting all Gypsies.

It was the only way, he told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday, for Italy to guarantee "to those who have the right to remain here, the possibility of living in decent conditions." For this purpose the Roma – those with Italian nationality and those without, EU citizens and those from outside the Community – will all have their fingerprints taken. And the rule will even apply to Gypsy children – for reasons that to many of Mr Maroni's supporters must have sounded obvious: "to avoid phenomena," as he put it, "such as begging". The new measures, he said, were indispensable "in order to expel those who do not have the right to stay in Italy".

For anybody not swept up in the wave of anti-Roma fury, the campaign has a strong whiff of Mussolini and Hitler about it.

The task of counting and identifying the residents of Italy, citizens or otherwise, who happen to belong the most despised minority in Europe is, in fact, already under way.

Not so long ago, immigrants being deported in Texas were held in a converted prison, even children being treated like prisoners, woken at 3 a.m. for bed checks and no education being offered for long waiting periods.

Immigration which takes place for the interests of employers seeking cheap labor is a sad choice of things to punish for. We can reform immigration more easily than make equal opportunities available to all. But both need to be addressed.