Citizens Bar Ex-Mayor from Own Town After He Makes Town Haven for Migrants
Citizens are pushing back against the liberal policies of “sanctuary cities” and seemingly endless immigration — and it isn’t just happening in the United States.
By now, it’s well known that one of the reasons Donald Trump was able to pull off his upset victory in 2016 is that he listened to heartland concerns about mass immigration, and pledged to do something about it while so many other candidates shrugged.
But other candidates took notice, and adopted similar populist approaches to win elections. We’ve seen that happen in far-flung places like Brazil and then Australia … and now you can add a small town in Italy to the list.
According to Agence France-Presse, Domenico Lucano, the ex-mayor of Riace, in southern Italy, has been literally barred from town after his liberal, pro-immigrant policies turned citizens against him.
It normally wouldn’t sound like an international story, but the interesting parallels between Riace and the situation in the United States are so interesting that it serves as a valuable lesson — and Lucano already has an international name.
In 2016, Lucano was drawing heavy attention for his work with migrants. He was named to Fortune magazine’s list of 50 of the “World’s Greatest Leaders” (among luminaries like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Pope Francis).
His story was told in a fawning, feel-good article in Al Jazeera that year, that described how in 1998 Lucano first started encouraging migrants to move to Riace when a boat containing Kurdish refugees landed near the town.
In the next two decades, migrants from 20 nations — including Afghanistan, Pakistan and countries of northern Africa, came to call Riace home, Al Jazeera reported.
But clearly, the town’s citizens have gotten unhappy with the situation.
“Former mayor Domenico ‘Mimmo’ Lucano encouraged migrants and refugees to come to the village to counter a gradual decline of inhabitants and workers and show how migrant integration could be done,” AFP reported last week.
“But now he is no longer even a member of the town council after his left-backed list lost in the elections, and he has been barred from the town,” the news wire continued.
That’s a pretty dramatic rise-and-fall story, but how did it happen?
“A whole economic system developed with the migrants, but without making the village dynamic again,” the town’s new mayor, Antonio Trifoli, told AFP. “The model destroyed itself.”
Here’s how the AFP story described the change:
“Over the years the town took in around 6,000 migrants…
“But that model of tolerance and inclusion has disappeared.
“‘Almost everyone has gone. There aren’t even any more children,’ said Daniel, a 37-year-old Ghanaian, in perfect Italian.”
It’s a story that liberal states like California would be wise to learn.
Lucano’s “immigrants first” policy over-saturated the town with problems, and paved the way for a forgotten political party to win big at the polls.
On May 26, Trifoli, a former policeman, was elected the new mayor.
He is associated with the Lega party (“The League”), a right-leaning group that has promised to put Italians first. Sound familiar?
“We will welcome refugees again,” Trifoli told AFP. “But we can’t have 500 to 600 asylum seekers [at one time] in a town with 1,500 residents.”
Just as Trump was laughed at by the establishment until the moment he won, the Lega party in Italy was fairly obscure in the past. Now it’s a major player in European politics.
What sets it apart from other parties? Its stance on immigration.
“The problem is that we had too many migrants and we lost the spirit of openness there was initially,” Trifoli said. “A whole economic system developed with the migrants, but without making the village dynamic again … The model destroyed itself.”
Not only did former Mayor Lucano promote open immigration, he also allegedly worked to personally assist migrants and may have broken the law to let them stay.
“Lucano was last year placed under house arrest for allegedly setting up fake marriages to help foreign women stay in the country after their asylum applications were rejected,” AFP reported.
In total, about 6,000 foreign immigrants came to Riace, a town that normally has about 1,500 residents. It isn’t hard to see that there were going to be problems from the onset.
It’s inevitable that anyone who opposes endless immigration will be called a racist — again, see Trump. But supporters of the Lega party say it isn’t about that at all, and instead is about facing reality.
“It’s not racism, it’s just that this is our home,” agricultural engineer Claudio Falchi, an engineer who has lived in the town for over two decades, told AFP. “We welcome them and then they make problems.”
When a town evicts its former mayor over unrestricted immigration, it’s a pretty good bet that those “problems” were getting serious.
But if he refused to listen to his own constituents and put foreigners first, is it really a surprise that it didn’t end well?
This is the reality that so many on the left — of many different countries — can’t seem to grasp: Wanting to put one’s own community first isn’t radical.
If anything, it’s the most universal trait among human societies … and refusing to face this fact will mean more lost elections for the open-borders crowd.
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