Anti-Immigration and Pro-Italy

A recent survey of global attitudes compared Italy to several other nations on a variety of issues and found that anti-immigrant sentiment is greater there than anywhere else and seems to go hand-in-hand with a strong sense of national pride and cultural superiority. Negativity about immigration peaks in Northern Italy, possibly because that region attracts more immigrants, but even in Southern Italy it's still greater than in any other nation.

Strong Concerns About Immigration

Immigration, however, may be the issue on which Italy is most distinctive. Like much of Western Europe, over the last few years Italy has wrestled with how to successfully integrate and assimilate its Muslim minority. Additionally, the recent influx of Romanian immigrants — especially Roma, or gypsies from Romania — into Italy has led to new controversies over immigration. The 2007 Pew poll included a number of questions on immigration, and on each of these, Italians held the most negative opinions of any Western public. Nearly two-thirds of Italians (64%) believe immigration is a very big problem for their country. In no other Western nation did a majority rate immigration a very big problem (Spain was the closest at 42%). In fact, Italy's level of concern was the highest, not only among Western countries, but among all 47 nations included in the survey.

Similarly, roughly three-in-four Italians (73%) say immigrants are having a bad effect on their country, considerably more than any other Western public, and second only to South Africa (75%) among the 47 nations in the study.

Fully 87% of Italians say there should be tighter restrictions on people coming into their country — up seven points from 2002, and again, the highest percentage among Western countries. Italian attitudes are overwhelmingly negative toward immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, as well as immigrants from Eastern Europe. Two-thirds say immigration from each of these areas is a bad thing.

National Pride

Despite all these signs of a rather dark mood, many Italians still reject the malaise argument, including Giuliano Amato, the country's interior minister. A week after Fisher's article appeared, Amato struck back in a letter to The New York Times, trumpeting his country's economy and health care system, and its recent successes in fighting the mafia.

Certainly, Amato is not alone in taking pride in his country, especially its culture. Italians are much more likely than their fellow Westerners to believe in their country's cultural pre-eminence. About two-in-three Italians (68%) agree with the statement "Our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior to others."

By contrast, in neighboring France — a country well known for having pride in its language and culture — only 32% say their culture is better than others. Italians are even more confident in their cultural superiority than Americans (55%), who themselves are well known for their strong national pride.

Richard Wike. "Italy's Malaise: La Vita Non É Cosí Dolce: Italians' Spirits Are Flagging — But Not Their Sense of Cultural Superiority". Pew Global Attitudes Project, 2008.

More than 1,000 immigrants have been evacuated from southern Italy after a recent wave of violence against African farm workers. Surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project over the past decade find that anti-immigrant sentiment is widespread in Italy.

For example, in 2007, Italians overwhelmingly said that immigration was a big problem in their country and that immigrants — both from the Middle East and North Africa and from Eastern European countries — were having a bad impact on Italy. More recently, in the fall of 2009, more than eight-in-ten Italians said they would like to see tighter restrictions on immigration.

Italians were more likely than any other public included in the 47-nation survey conducted in 2007 to see immigration as a big problem in their country. More than nine-in-ten Italians (94%) considered immigration to be a big problem, including 64% who said it was a very big problem in Italy.

By comparison, a much narrower majority of South Africans (53%) — the second most likely to rate immigration as a very big problem in their country — shared that view.

Majorities of Italians across demographic and regional groups saw immigration as a very big problem, but those who lived in the northern parts of the country were especially likely to say that was the case.

About three-quarters (74%) of those who lived in the north saw immigration as a very big problem in Italy, compared with 54% in the south, where the recent violence has been concentrated.

Juliana Menasce Horowitz. "Widespread Anti-Immigrant Sentiment in Italy". Pew Global Attitudes Project, 2010.

Related: Anti-Minority Sentiment, Nationalist Attitudes Highest in Italy

Italian Beauty: Monica Bellucci

Actress and model from Città di Castello, Perugia, Umbria.

Coon's Bizarre Conclusion Explained

In the chapter on Italy in his book The Races of Europe, anthropologist Carleton S. Coon describes Northern and Southern Italians as being very similar in both subracial make-up and pigmentation (which I've confirmed with facial composites):

In the population of [northern Italy] there is a strong prevalence of Alpine and Dinaric types, especially the former, but approximately one-third of the population is long-headed or nearly so. [...] In other words, the southern Italians are a blend for the most part of Alpines and small Mediterraneans, while among the northern Italians the most important dolichocephalic strain is the Atlanto-Mediterranean. [...] The pigmentation [in northern Italy] is lighter than in southern Italy, but still prevailingly brunet.

Alpine

Small Mediterranean

Dinaric

Atlanto-Mediterranean

But then in the last paragraph, he concludes with this bizarre statement that seems to contradict (or at least greatly exaggerate) everything that came before:

No country in Europe in which one language and one cultural tradition prevail shows a greater diversity of race between its southern and its northern extremities than does Italy.

To unravel this mystery, we need to understand that Coon's book started out as a revision of an earlier work by William Z. Ripley, also called The Races of Europe. I was looking through it recently and found this nearly identical statement, with an added twist at the end:

We have now seen how gradual is the transition from one half of Italy to the other [with] profound contrasts between the extremes of north and south. These must ever stand as witness to differences of physical origin as wide apart as Asia is from Africa.

It seems pretty clear that Coon's statement is a holdover from Ripley. So are Northern and Southern Italians really as different from each other as Asians are from Africans? Not exactly. Ripley's book dates back to the 19th century, and his analysis, which fell into what Coon called the "prestatistical school", was accordingly very rudimentary. He based his conclusions almost entirely on the single craniofacial trait of cephalic index. This led him to believe that brachycephalic (round-headed) Alpines and Dinarics were similar to Mongoloids, and dolichocephalic (long-headed) Mediterraneans and Nordics were similar to Negroids, an absurd notion that must have seemed reasonable given the limited knowledge of the time. Here's the passage where he explains his peculiar classification system and how Italians fit into it:

The most conspicuous feature of our map of cephalic index for western Europe is that here within a limited area all the extremes of head form known to the human race are crowded together. In other words, the so-called white race of Europe is not physically a uniform and intermediate type in the proportions of the head between the brachycephalic Asiatics and the long-headed negroes of Africa. A few years ago it was believed that this was true. More recently, detailed research has revealed hitherto unsuspected limits of variation. They are roughly indicated by our portraits of living European types at page 39. In the high Alps of northwestern Italy are communes with an average index of 89, an extreme of round-headedness not equalled anywhere else in the world save in the Balkan Peninsula and in Asia Minor. This type of head prevails all through the Alps, quite irrespective of political frontiers. These superficial boundaries are indicated in white lines upon the map to show their independence of racial limits. There is no essential difference in head form between the Bavarians and Italian Piedmontese, or between the French Savoyards and the Tyrolese.

From what has been said, it will appear that these Alpine populations in purity exceed any known tribes of central Asia in the breadth of their heads. Yet within three hundred miles as the crow flies, in the island of Corsica, are communes with an average cephalic index of 73. These mountaineers of inland Corsica are thus as long-headed as any tribe of Australians, the wood Veddahs of Ceylon [Sri Lanka], or any African negroes of which we have extended observations. A little way farther to the north there are other populations in Scotland, Ireland, and Scandinavia which are almost as widely different from the Alpine peoples in the proportions of the head as are the Corsicans. An example of extreme individual variation downward is shown in our Teutonic type at page 39, which has a lower index than any recorded for the longest-headed primitive races known. Nor is this all. Pass to northern Scandinavia, and we find among the Lapps, again, one of the broadest-headed peoples of the earth, of a type shown in our series of portraits.

So remarkably sudden are these transitions that one is tempted at first to regard them as the results of chance. Further examination is needed to show that it must be due to law. Proof of this is offered by the map itself; for it indicates a uniform gradation of head form from several specific centres of distribution outward. Consider Italy, for example, where over three hundred thousand individuals, from every little hamlet, have been measured in detail. The transition from north to south is, as we shall see, perfectly consistent. The people of the extreme south are like the Africans among our portraits at page 45 in respect to the head form; gradually the type changes until in Piedmont we reach an extreme perfectly similar to that depicted on our other page of brachycephalic Asiatic types. So it is all over the continent. Each detailed research is a check on its neighbor. There is no escape from the conclusion that we have to do with law.

Two distinct varieties of man, measured by the head form alone, are to be found within the confines of this little continent. One occupies the heart of western Europe as an outpost of the great racial type which covers all Asia and most of eastern Europe as well. The other, to which we as Anglo-Saxons owe allegiance, seems to hang upon the outskirts of Europe, intrenched in purity in the islands and peninsulas alone. Northern Africa, as we have already observed, is to be classed with these. Furthermore, this long-headed type appears to be aggregated about two distinct centers of distribution — in the north and south respectively. In the next chapter we shall show that these two centres of long-headedness are again divided from one another in respect of both colour of hair and eyes and stature. From the final combination of all these bodily characteristics we discover that in reality in Europe we have to do with three physical types, and not two. Thus we reject at once that old classification in our geographies of all the people of Europe under a single title of the white, the Indo-Germanic, Caucasian, or Aryan race. Europe, instead of being a monotonous entity, is a most variegated patchwork of physical types. Each has a history of its own, to be worked out from a study of the living men. Upon the combination of these racial types in varying proportions one with another the superstructure of nationality has been raised.

Sure enough, when we look at his map of cephalic index in Europe, the extreme North and extreme South of Italy are farther apart in average cephalic index than any other nation in Europe. But of course, we know that this isn't a racial difference, and that when multiple craniofacial traits are analyzed, all Caucasoids cluster together, away from Asians and Africans. Coon knew this as well, which is why he ignored Ripley's rejection of a unified white race, and was able to identify Dinarics as "Mediterranean derivatives" despite their different head shape. So the only reasonable explanation for his retaining Ripley's erroneous conclusion about Italians is that it was an oversight.

Soccer Player Facial Composites

I've made facial composites out of large random samples of Northern, Central and Southern Italian soccer players from the RaiSport website, using both birthplace and surname origin as the criteria for inclusion. This is the third (and by far the biggest) regional comparison of this sort that I've done now, and it's the third time that the composites have come out looking almost identical.

Northern Italian (N = 227)

Central Italian (N = 116)

Southern Italian (N = 152)

Here's an animated GIF of the three composites morphing into each other in an endless loop. You have to look closely to see the changes.


Software: Sqirlz Morph

Related: Regional Soccer Player Composites

Illiteracy Rates by Region

Historically, literacy has been much higher in Northern Italy than in the more rural South, but that gap has been narrowing steadily since the 19th century and is now almost completely closed, with the younger generations everywhere being >98% literate like the rest of the developed world.*

In the table below, column one shows regional illiteracy rates for people under the age of 65, which are nearly the same throughout Italy. Column two shows people 65 and over, where the gap still persists. And column three shows the total population. The data was compiled by Istat for the 2001 census.


Vincenzo D'Aprile. "Analfabetismo: Italia — Censimento 2001: Cinque Grandi Ripartizioni Geografiche e Venti Regioni". Educazione&Scuola, 2005.

---------------
*According to Felice and Giugliano (2011): "The reason literacy was so low in the Southern regions was that, until 1861, they formed a different state, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which did not promote compulsory education, unlike the pre-unitarian states of Northern Italy. Once compulsory education was extended to the South (from 1861) and after adequate financial resources were spent for its provision by the Italian State (from 1911), the Southern regions converged in literacy."

Legacy and Value of Latin

Although Latin — an Indo-European language at its height during the Roman Empire — is nobody's native tongue these days, it certainly remains a topic of conversation. The usual point of debate? Whether learning Latin is valuable for modern-day students.

"I don't think people know what they mean when they dismiss Latin as a dead language," said Paul Harvey, associate professor of classics at Penn State. "Of course it is not spoken in many places, save for the Vatican and a few classics departments. But whether a language is currently spoken is irrelevant to the continuing value of learning it and to the value of literature written in that language."

Even if you never read Virgil or Cicero in the original, explains Harvey, "Latin is the root language from which variations developed into today's modern Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and a few less-spoken European tongues. On a practical level, it is far easier for those with a firm foundation in Latin to learn a modern Romance language."

Whether you've studied Latin or not, most people already use it constantly, Harvey adds. The ancient Latin/Roman alphabet is the most widely used writing system in the world, and is the alphabet of English and almost all other European languages. Up to 60 percent of modern English words derive from Latin, directly or indirectly.

Latin is our foundational language, explains Harvey, and that awareness may be a factor in the current revival of interest in Latin in our schools. One indicator is the number of students taking the AP Latin exam has doubled in the last decade. "From what I've seen and read," Harvey said, "the revival in schools — including inner city schools — has less to do with a renewed interest in the classical past than a realization that the more Latin students learn, the higher their SAT verbal and analytical scores." In fact, students of Latin had notably higher mean SAT Verbal scores than students of Spanish, French or German.

"Furthermore," Harvey notes, "there is a continuing appreciation that studying Greek and Latin — the classical languages of Western civilization — demonstrably enhances the ability to write cogently in English." The reason for this is "rather straightforward," believes Harvey: "The successful study of a highly inflected language forces students to understand better the grammar and syntax of their own native language and that, in turn, encourages clarity of expression and analytical thought."

In today's era of online chat acronyms and text-messaging abbreviations, the ability to write well in English may be an increasingly rare and valuable career asset. Future attorneys, doctors and scientists would be well advised to study Latin to get a jump on the professional jargon, says Harvey. "And students wishing to study practically any aspect of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance literature, art, music, and history are at a serious disadvantage if they do not know Latin well."

Melissa Beattie-Moss. "Probing Question: Is Latin valuable for today's students?". Research/Penn State, April 27, 2011.

New York's Little Italy Is Disappearing

People have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, it feels like the end of an era and a sort of Asian takeover, but on the other, it's an indication that Italians have made it in America and moved beyond the "old neighborhood".

In 1950, nearly half of the more than 10,000 New Yorkers living in the heart of Little Italy identified as Italian-American. The narrow streets teemed with children and resonated with melodic exchanges in Italian among the one in five residents born in Italy and their second- and third-generation neighbors.

By 2000, the census found that the Italian-American population had dwindled to 6 percent. Only 44 were Italian-born, compared with 2,149 a half-century earlier.

A census survey released in December determined that the proportion of Italian-Americans among the 8,600 residents in the same two-dozen-square-block area of Lower Manhattan had shrunk to about 5 percent.

And, incredibly, the census could not find a single resident who had been born in Italy.

Little Italy is becoming Littler Italy. The encroachment that began decades ago as Chinatown bulged north, SoHo expanded from the west, and other tracts were rebranded more fashionably as NoLIta (for north of Little Italy) and NoHo seems almost complete.

The Little Italy that was once the heart of Italian-American life in the city exists mostly as a nostalgic memory or in the minds of tourists who still make it a must-see on their New York itinerary.

[...]

Last year, the National Park Service designated a Chinatown and Little Italy Historic District with no geographic distinction between the neighborhoods. The two neighborhoods have begun organizing a Marco Polo Day and an East Meets West Christmas Parade.

City Hall will soon further erase the boundaries.

Following the lead of three local community boards, the City Planning Commission is expected in March to approve the creation of a Chinatown Business Improvement District, which would engulf all but about two square blocks of a haven that once spanned almost 50 square blocks and had the largest concentration of Italian immigrants in the United States.

"It's really all Chinatown now," said John A. Zaccaro Sr., owner of the Little Italy real estate company, founded by his father in 1935.

Even the Feast of San Gennaro, which still draws giant crowds to Mulberry Street, may be abbreviated in size this year at the behest of inconvenienced NoLIta merchants.

The number of residents of Italian descent in the neighborhood has been declining since the 1960s, as immigration from Italy ebbed and Italian-Americans prospered and moved to other parts of the city and to the suburbs.

"When the Italians made money they moved to Queens and New Jersey, they sold to the Chinese, who are now selling to the Vietnamese and Malaysians," said Ernest Lepore, 46, who, with his brother and mother, owns Ferrara, an espresso and pastry shop his family opened 119 years ago.

[...]

Of the 8,600 residents counted by the census's American Community Survey in the heart of Little Italy in 2009, nearly 4,400 were foreign-born. Of those, 89 percent were born in Asia. In 2009, a Korean immigrant won a tenor competition sponsored by the Little Italy Merchants Association. That same year, a Chinese immigrant, Margaret S. Chin, was elected to represent the district in the City Council.

Sam Roberts. "New York's Little Italy, Littler by the Year". The New York Times, February 21, 2011.

Sacco and Vanzetti Revisited

This infamous criminal case is one of the most cited examples of "anti-Italianism" in America. In 1927, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed for the murders of a paymaster and a security guard during an armed robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts. There's still debate about whether they were guilty or innocent, and it's possible that one was guilty and the other wasn't, but I haven't studied the case closely, so I don't really have an opinion either way. However, few people deny that they received an unfair trial compromised by tainted evidence, and there were worldwide protests over their convictions and executions, including by prominent figures of the day like Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

While it's possible that their status as immigrants from Southern Europe could have been a factor, since it was a time in American history when foreigners and non-Northern Europeans were looked at suspiciously and unfavorably, I've seen no credible evidence of that, let alone that specifically anti-Italian prejudice played any part. What's certain is that they were anarchists and followers of Luigi Galleani, a notorious revolutionary who advocated violence, assassination and bombing. Militant anarchists were a big problem back then, kind of like militant Islamists today. President William McKinley had been assassinated by Polish-American anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901, and the Department of Justice had arrested and deported 500 anarchists and other alien radicals in the 1919 Palmer Raids, including Galleani and eight of his followers. So any prejudice against Sacco and Vanzetti would have been based on their political affiliations and activities more than anything else. Indeed, the judge at the trial, Webster Thayer, was an outspoken opponent of anarchism and bolshevism who made several inappropriate off-the-bench comments to that effect, for which he was criticized by the press and his peers.

But that attitude was common at the time, and the Sacco and Vanzetti case in fact has a historical precedent that's almost identical in every detail, except that everyone involved was of Northern European descent. In 1886, there was a bombing during a demonstration at Haymarket Square in Chicago, and eight anarchists (five German immigrants, a German-American, an Englishman, and a Southerner) were tried and convicted as conspirators in the death of a police officer, despite a lack of evidence against them. Four of the men were hanged, and a fifth committed suicide in prison on the eve of his scheduled execution. Their unfair treatment also generated worldwide protests, and it's thought by most that they were likely innocent. To this day, no one knows for sure who the bomber was, but speculation revolves around a number of other people, including many who weren't involved in the anarchist movement.

When you look at these parallels and the historical context, it's difficult to imagine that there was anything anti-Italian at play with Sacco and Vanzetti, but some people see only what they want to see.

More Criticism of Richard Lynn

Italian researchers have really stepped up to publish refutations of Lynn's bogus IQ study. This one follows two papers last year as well as my own critique.

In his article "In Italy, North-South differences in IQ predict differences in income, education, infant mortality, stature, and literacy," Richard Lynn claims to have found the reason causing the divergence between the Northern and the Southern regions of Italy. This article identifies the four main hypotheses formulated in his paper and presents significant evidence against each one of them. We claim that the evidence presented by the author is not sufficient to say that the IQ of Southern Italians is lower than the one of Northern Italians; that his analysis does not prove that there is any causal link between what he defines as IQ and any of the variables mentioned; that there is no evidence that the alleged differences in IQ are persistent in time and, therefore, attributable to genetic factors.

Felice and Giugliano. "Myth and reality: A response to Lynn on the determinants of Italy's North-South imbalances". Intelligence, 2011.

Ötzi the Iceman Reconstruction

This is the latest, and supposedly most accurate, reconstruction of Ötzi, a natural mummy from the Stone Age discovered 20 years ago frozen in the Italian Alps near the Austrian border. Based on new research and the latest technology, it shows that he looked much older than his age and that his eyes were brown.

Brown-eyed, bearded, furrow faced, and tired: this is how Ötzi the Iceman might have looked, according to the latest reconstruction based on 20 years of research and investigations.

Realized by two Dutch experts, Alfons and Adrie Kennis, the model was produced with the latest in forensic mapping technology that uses three-dimensional images of the mummy's skull as well as infrared and tomographic images.

The new reconstruction shows a prematurely old man, with deep-set eyes, sunken cheeks, a furrowed face and ungroomed beard and hair.

Although he looks tired, Ötzi has vivid brown eyes. Indeed, recent research on the 5,300-year-old mummy has shown that the Stone Age man did not have blue eyes as previously thought.

Believed to have died around the age of 45, Ötzi was about 1.60 meters (5 foot, 3 inches) tall and weighed 50 kilograms (110 pounds).

The model will go on display beginning March 1 to Jan. 15, 2012, at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy.

Called "Ötzi 20," the exhibition celebrates the 20th anniversary of the mummy's discovery. The Iceman's frozen body was found in a melting glacier in the Ötzal Alps — hence the Ötzi name — on Sept. 19, 1991.

Rossella Lorenzi. "The Iceman Mummy: Finally Face to Face". Discovery News, February 25, 2011.

Related: Affinity of Ancient and Modern Italians