In Prato, a city in the Tuscany region, 27.829 Chinese citizens live. The city with just over 194 thousand inhabitants is the subject of Parliamentary Committee monitoring the implementation of the Schengen agreement.
On Tuesday (8), to provide the data to the commission, the mayor of Prato, Adriana Nicolina Rosaria Cogode, did not just focus on the numbers of the presence of foreigners in the city and the province.
According to her, 15 thousand Chinese present in the city live like ghosts. “We know nothing, neither where they work nor what conditions they live in”, says the mayor.
A number often passed around secretly in the city, but which means the presence of 8% of Prato that live in marginal conditions, without any kind of assistance and who obviously run the risk of ending up in the hands of criminal organizations. “These are people who arrive regularly with a tourist visa in Italy, but who, after the document expires, do not leave the territory, but are absorbed by a system, making them work in irregular or exploitative conditions, or ending up dedicating themselves to illegal activities”, explains Cogode.
Another fact that surprised the parliamentary commissioners was the requests for Italian nationality made by the Chinese. In 2021, only one immigrant made the request. A clear sign of unwillingness to acquire the Italian citizenship, perhaps because the Chinese government bans dual citizenship.
In this way, Beijing is able to control its citizens abroad and maintain a connection between chinatowns from all over Europe. The illegality that characterizes the Chinese is not delinquent, but economic, almost parasitic.
Illegality reflects in crime
According to data presented to the parliamentary committee, in 2021, 2.949 people were summoned, of which 59% were foreigners.
Of the 403 prisoners, 277 were foreigners, or 68%. The incidence of thefts committed by citizens of third countries in 2021 was 50%, two thirds of thefts were attributed to citizens of non-EU countries, and 84 of the 97 drug-related crimes were committed by citizens of third countries.
Just to give an example, Cogode recalled that of the 173 robberies reported in Prato in 2021, 88 were committed by citizens from outside the União European.
“The situation, although not an emergency, requires the need to maintain a high level of attention and prevention in the area. We cannot allow phenomena of illegality to take hold, which could increase with the return to post-Covid normality. In terms of perception of safety, the expectations of the people of Prato remain very high. Here there is a high sense of civic duty and it is a duty to respond to the demands of citizenship”, explained the mayor, in a hearing at the Ministry of the Interior.
Immigrants
Many Chinese workers enter Italy on tourist visas. When they are detained without documents, they cannot be repatriated because China refuses to receive them without official identification. With an expulsion paper in their pocket, the illegal immigrants are free and dive back into the informal market.
In the early 80s, the first Chinese began to disembark in neighboring Florence. A pioneer group of 38 immigrants took up residence in Prato in 1989.
In the following decade, the ethnic Chinese population would grow exponentially, first occupying a space abandoned by the Italians at the base of the production chain, then as entrepreneurs.
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