Immigration politics

Friday, July 28, 2006
Italian Interior Minister Giuliano Amato has written to EU Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini to call for greater EU action on immigration. In the last few days more than 2,000 illegal immigrants have arrived in Lampedusa. An article in the Die Welt describes EU measures to cope with the immigration wave from North Africa as “insufficient”.

Meanwhile, Le Monde reports that there is political controversy over the number of illegal immigrants in Spain. The government puts it at 700,000 while the opposition are claiming it is more like 1.6 million. The European Union faces an urgent need for better migration statistics to support the development of a common EU migration policy. Once the EU Regulation on international migration and asylum statistics is in place, statistical data collection should be improved in terms of availability and reliability.

 

Morrissey's Rome

Wednesday, July 26, 2006
I did not bump into Morrissey in Rome during my frequent working visits there in the last months. Still, with every visit to the eternal city, I get more hints about why he decided to re-locate there from Los Angeles. In his review of Morrissey's Rome inspired Ringleader of the Tormentors, Alexis Petridis says the new album has a mystery and magic of its own. Author Douglas Coupland flew from Vancouver to Rome to interview Morrissey to try to understand the man who 'defines eccentricity'. When he asked him, 'Why Rome?', Morrissey's simple answer was 'I fell in love with the city.' According to this NME piece, he switched to Rome because it is the exact opposite to Los Angeles.

I had originally planned to go the Morrissey concert last week at the Teatro Romano di Ostia Antica but it fell in the middle of my Eurobarometer press conference week. My friends tell me that the first words Morrissey said as soon as he entered the stage were "Mamma Roma", the name of a film by Pasolini about an ex-prostitute who tries to start a new life selling vegetables with her 16 year old son. Ostia, the concert location, was the place where Pasolini was killed nearly 31 years ago.