Minister Valeria Fedeli later tweeted however that she was fine and that “attempts at bullying won’t stop our civil rights battle”.
Demonstrators clashed with law enforcement outside the Senate building, where police tried to disperse them with a water cannon. Inside, angry senators from the anti-immigrant Northern League, waved signs saying “Stop the invasion” and “Italians first”.
Opponents argue that granting Italian citizenship would give potential jihadists a legal foothold in society, and is tantamount to “ethnic substitution”.
Local media have speculated that the Italian government might put the bill to a confidence vote to bypass a massive 80 000 amendments filed by the Northern League.
It is unclear when a final vote on the Ius Soli bill will be held.
The reform would confer citizenship on more than 800 000, or 80 percent, of foreign minors currently living in Italy, according to the Leone Moressa Foundation, a think tank that studies the economics of immigration in Mestre near Venice.
Together with Greece, Italy is the main port of entry for the great majority of refugees mainly from Africa. The numbers are up from 2014 and 2015, amounting to nearly half a million immigrants over three years, an influx of unprecedented magnitude.
Italy has a population of 60.6 million, of which 8.3 percent or just over five million are now foreign, according to official statistics. No one—not the Prime Minister in Rome nor the local officials who must accommodate the arriving migrants—has the faintest idea.
Confcommercio, the general confederation of Italian businesses, has shown that according to official government crime data in 2016 migrants contribute hugely to crime: “These calculations lead us to conclude that, approximately and on average, crime rates for Italians, legal aliens, and illegal aliens are . . . equal respectively to 4.3, 8.5, and 246.3 per 1,000 individuals of the group in question.”
These reliable figures show legal immigrants are twice as likely as Italians to commit crimes while illegals are a staggering 57 times as likely.
Illegals are 38 times as likely as Italians to commit homicide or acts of injurious violence, 48 times more likely to rape, and 52 times as likely to be involved in drug-related crimes. The same goes for armed robbery, theft, and prostitution.
The so-called Ius Soli [law of the soil] bill would grant citizenship to children born in Italy of foreign parents, and to children who have spent at least five years in an Italian school system. Supporters of the bill argue that such children would eventually boost Italy’s ageing population, contribute to the national economy and pay taxes. An ageing population means there are more pensioners than workers
The controversial bill was first proposed by an immigrant rights campaign called Italia Sono Anch’Io (I Also Am Italy), which had gathered 200 000 signatures to petition parliament in 2011-2012. The bill passed the Lower House in October 2015.
Laura Boldrini, the current president of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, recently called for a “culture of hospitality” in Europe, stating that “immigrants today are the human element of globalisation; their lifestyle will soon be the lifestyle of all of us.”
Pope Francis gave a speech at the University of Rome in February, urging open borders and “cultural exchange”, adding that Europe was a continent of immigrants and that terrorism was caused by high unemployment.
But according to a survey by Eumetra Monterosa at the end of 2016, only 22 percent of Italians favor current immigration policies. Some 78 percent want to see immigrant ships either blocked at their ports of origin or escorted back.