Challenge of Our Time

By Klara GUDZYK, The Day

Several tens of thousands of Ukrainians stay now in Italy as migrant laborers, which only makes a fraction of the total number of immigrants in that country. People of all countries — to be more exact, from all poor countries — go there. Most of them are “illegals,” i.e., foreigners without permission to stay even temporarily. As we know, the same picture can also be seen in other affluent Western countries. What has been shaped resembles a chimerically distorted demographic landscape. Its center, deep within, are a small number of prosperous oligarch countries (this golden billion accounts for about one-sixth of the world’s population). Rivers of the poor and hungry, often frightened by domestic wars, flow down the steep slopes of poverty toward that center, as once did hordes of nomads in search of new virgin pastures. They would eat, pull up, trample down, and devastate everything and then go on to another place in order to survive.

Today’s West has become this kind of pasture where many Ukrainians are grazing. What is going to happen to this world in the immediate future? Perhaps radical changes, for potential migrants, more numerous than the local affluent, could flood the oligarchic dam, thus wiping out all their pastures, i.e., loans, charity, medical and military aid, and, most importantly, jobs and bread.

These reflections were caused by communication with Ukrainian former illegal aliens who went to Italy in order to earn at least some money any way they can. Having saved a certain sum, they go home absolutely unchanged. What I mean is that the overwhelming majority of our compatriots acquire not one iota of the mystical substance which once made Italy (despite defeat and ruin in World War II, political instability, and corruption) a country where most people live decently. Our guest workers bring back to Ukraine neither any new awareness of the vital need for hard work in this life nor any new idea of fair business practices. What they take away with them is only contempt for those for whom they worked for money and, at the same time, contempt for the country and its culture. In fact, the illegals care very little about culture because from their perspective it has nothing to do with wages.

What will this new great migration of peoples, mixing cultures, customs, and religious faiths, lead to? What will happen in these conditions to the great national cultures that lay the foundation of Western civilization? To Italian or French cultures, for example? Could it result in a kind of cosmopolitan railroad stations or airports, where only the names, not essences, allow an individual not to lose his bearings and identify things?

Also dangerous is the fact that such highest achievements of Western culture as tolerance, humanism, and democracy are also undergoing a test of strength. Will they survive? For it is not easy to be guided by democratic principles, in dealing with illegal immigrants, and every man cannot be tolerant or humane of the cagey characters who have swamped his country instead of building a new life somewhere else, preferably in their own.

There are as many foreigners in Rome today as there were in ancient times, when slaves were brought here from all parts of the known world. As before, there are still many true Quirinal natives among modern Romans, who want to preserve the Eternal City for themselves rather than turn it into a pasture for the “barbarians.” Their preoccupation with the invasion by the latter sometimes assumes amazingly vivid farms.

A loud stir was raised in a Roman subway half-empty car at the St. Peter’s Cathedral station. A venerable elderly signora sitting next to me suddenly and without provocation turned on a young Gypsy with a baby and began to push her out of the car. The lady was rudely jerking and pushing with her fists not only the mother but also the infant, crying out, as if she were mad, one word: “ Via! Via! Via! (Out!).” If it had been a tram or a bus and not the subway, where there was no place to fall, no one knows what this would have led to, for the rivals were in different weight categories.

Not a single passenger stood up for the victims of violence, the mother and the child. And it was difficult to say which side in this conflict represented a higher or a lower — aggressive and ruthless — civilization. I personally dislike those who hit and scream.