New York Times

Off Sicily, Tide of Bodies Roils Immigrant Debate

By FRANK BRUNI

CAPO ROSSELLO, Sicily, Sept. 21 - The 15 dead bodies found in the hours

immediately following the shipwreck were only the beginning.

A day later, 12 more were pulled from the sea, and two days after that, a

few more. By today, nearly a week after a crowded boat carrying well over

100 Liberian immigrants sank within a few hundred yards of the shore here in

Sicily, the number of dead had reached 36, and law enforcement officials

were not convinced that they had seen the last of the victims.

So Giuseppe Barrale and Oronzo Maruggio, two coast guard officers, kept an

eye on the water as their search-and-rescue vessel cruised yet again past

the spot where the boat went down. A dark shadow below the waves, they

explained, might signal the surfacing of a body. They were becoming somewhat

expert at this.

"It's part of the job," Mr. Barrale said. "It shouldn't be, but it is."

Mr. Maruggio wondered aloud about the calculation these immigrants had made.

"In death, what have they gained?" he asked. "Their freedom?" He shook his

head.

More and more foreigners are pouring illegally into southern Italy from

northern Africa, a new wave of immigrants mingling with the tides of people

coming from Eastern Europe and elsewhere. But they are coming at grave risk.

[Late Sunday, Sicilian law enforcement officials at Ragusa said the bodies

of at least 10 immigrants, from northern Africa, had been found after they

apparently tried to swim from their boat to shore.]

The immigration is stirring powerful crosscurrents of emotion, igniting

fierce political debate and spawning as many questions as answers.

That is true throughout Western Europe, where an influx of immigrants in the

last few years has tested the tolerance and generosity of the French and the

English, the Germans and the Dutch, often giving politicians on the right a

potent and effective issue on which to campaign.

But in Italy in particular, the situation has intensified in recent weeks,

with enforcement of a new immigration law, the widely publicized

apprehension of hundreds of illegal immigrants and the mass drowning here in

Capo Rossello, near Agrigento, on Sicily's southern shore.

Those deaths, during the stormy, moonless first hours of Sept. 15, provided

a symbol both of the immigrants' desperation to reach Western Europe and of

Italy's special predicament as a point of entry with a coastline so long

that many foreigners see it as a gamble worth taking.

Even many days after the shipwreck, people here were still haunted by what

had happened to many of the at least 128 passengers, 92 of whom were known

to have survived.

"We didn't see them, but we definitely heard them screaming," said Nicola

Notarrigo, owner of a beachfront restaurant. "Then, moments later, we

couldn't hear them anymore."

A little less than a year and a half ago, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi

won office on a platform that prominently included promises to crack down on

illegal immigration and on crime, which many Italians see as related issues.

He also forged a coalition with more conservative politicians who are

resolutely anti-immigration.

One result was a new immigration law that took effect this month. It makes

it harder for new immigrants to obtain residency permits; easier for Italian

law enforcement officials to expel immigrants who do not have the right

paperwork or consistent employment; and more costly, in terms of fines or

criminal sentences, for employers and immigrants who run afoul of the

regulations.

The new law also requires immigrants from non-European Union countries to be

fingerprinted upon their arrival in Italy.

Giuseppe Pisanu, Italy's interior minister, said this week that it was "a

good law, balanced and humane," because it sought to control the number of

immigrants and monitor their activities while still permitting those who

have regular work to stay.

The new law has done little to settle political quarrels over the right

equilibrium between order and mercy and between the country's immigration

needs and its immigration fears.

Right-wing politicians continue to push for stricter rules, and their

pressure to expel more immigrants with more dispatch has created serious

tensions in Mr. Berlusconi's center-right governing coalition.

It has also led to some unusual public remarks.

Giancarlo Gentilini, the mayor of the northern Italian city of Treviso, said

recently, "We shouldn't just take their fingerprints, but also their

footprints and the prints of their noses if necessary."

That comment followed similarly strong language from Mr. Gentilini last

month, after he evicted about 20 Moroccan families that had been squatting

in public buildings in Treviso.

"This is a people that was chased around by gazelles and lions where they

come from," Mr. Gentilini told reporters. "Our civilization is superior to

that of the desert, and in Treviso we don't want the casbah."

Roman Catholic leaders, human rights advocates and many other Italians worry

that xenophobia and political pandering are leading to unduly harsh

treatment of people who do not deserve it.

Business owners, for their part, have a less emotional, more practical

complaint about the new law, which some of them see as too restrictive. They

fear it will leave them unable to fill seasonal and short-term jobs in

factories and on farms.

A majority of Italians across the political spectrum seem to agree that the

government must do something to manage illegal immigration, which has been

increasing sharply.

During the first eight months of this year, according to figures from the

Interior Ministry, more than 16,000 immigrants arrived in Italy, compared

with about 12,000 in the same period last year.

Perhaps even more striking, their countries of origin and patterns of travel

changed. Fewer now are traveling westward, through Albania on their way to

the southeastern region of Apulia, while more have been coming north, from

points in Africa.

The long voyages and sometimes rickety boats they use have occasionally

meant disaster, as they did for those who died off Capo Rossello.

Supporters of the new law said that once it has been in effect longer, more

immigrants have been sent back and the word gets out, fewer will take the

kinds of risks that those passengers did.

Others have their doubts. Livia Turco, a liberal member of Parliament who

helped write the previous, more permissive immigration law, said the

government had yet to solicit as many agreements and as much cooperation

from countries the immigrants are leaving as it needs.

"This fast process found us completely unprepared and scared," Ms. Turco

said.

The process seemed to accelerate anew this week, with a series of boats

angling toward Italian shores, day after day, and hundreds of immigrants

rounded up and sent to refugee centers, where they often sought asylum with

uncertain outcomes.

So it was with the survivors of the Capo Rossello wreck, whose backgrounds

and exact travel route remained unclear. Law enforcement officials and

Catholic Church workers who helped the survivors said it was unclear how

much truth they were telling.

They informed their rescuers that they had fled Liberia because of violence

there, then boarded a ship from Sierra Leone around Sept. 1.

At some point, law enforcement officials said, the immigrants may have been

moved to a smaller boat; at any rate, the crowded wooden vessel that

approached Sicily was apparently tossed by stormy weather against rocks that

ripped it.

"I managed to swim," said a 27-year-old man who sat, six days later, in a

church haven for refugees near Syracuse. He said he had little memory of the

confusion around him, "because I was only looking up at my God to save me."

He would not give his name. He was sketchy about his past, which he said

included the deaths or disappearances of all of his relatives in Liberia.

What he said suggested that while an immigration law may stop people from

succeeding, it will not necessarily stop them from trying.

"If they send me back, they send me back," he said. "I don't care. I've

already lost everything in my life."