There is a big community of Ghanaians and then there are the Albanians and all the others.
FONTANAFREDDA, Italy – The grey, reinforced concrete wall is two and a half metres high and 800 metres long. At night, it will be lit by powerful floodlights. By 2010, when the development is complete, there will also be CCTV cameras and a 24-hour guard. Later, it might even have its own security service. The development will house 250 people, doubling the local population, and no one will be able to get into this latter-day fortified citadel without showing identification. Welcome to Borgo Ronche. This residential complex is currently under construction in the Borgo Ronche district of Fontanafredda, a municipality with 10,000 inhabitants five kilometres from Pordenone. It’s a secure, walled complex because here in north-east Italy, people don’t feel safe any more. “It’s the foreigners’ fault”, they say. “There are too many of them”.
Here in the province of Pordenone, legal immigrants account for 12.6% of the population compared with a national average of 4.5% (ISTAT data for 2006). There is a big community of Ghanaians and then there are the Albanians and all the others. A thousand or so are illegals. It makes no difference if Pordenone’s chief of police Vincenzo Carella says that “the situation is under control. The number of burglaries has dropped. Insecurity is more perceived than real. People see a lot of foreigners and don’t feel relaxed any more but let’s not start scaremongering”.