“Italians Steal Our Jobs” – Insulting Swiss Posters Attack Italian “Rats”

Cross-border workers depicted as three rats. One is called Giulio and has a shield with three peaks (Tre-monti)

“We Lombards and you Ticino Swiss speak the same language. We both say ‘go and sell your arse!’” thundered the jovial former Northern League mayor of Milan, Marco Formentini, on an official visit to our Swiss cousins. Cousins? It depends, as the shameful “Italian rat” campaign launched against cross-border workers demonstrates.

For some time, the Ticino League has been making the same accusations although its leader Giuliano Bignasca seems to have forgotten he was found guilty by the court of Lugano in 1993 of employing a dozen or so permit-less Yugoslavians. The charge is that workers from Como, Varese and Verbania “are stealing Swiss jobs”. It’s an obsession, which prompted La Provincia di Como newspaper, hardly a left-leaning publication, to run the headline “there’s always a League supporter to the north of us”.

The claim is an old one. You only have to remember James Schwarzenbach, the man who promoted three referendums – almost winning the first one – against Italian immigrants, and in particular against their wives and children. He wrote that “they are dead weights round our necks (...) We must free ourselves of this burden. We must remove from our community the immigrants we have summoned to do the meanest jobs and who, in the course of a few years, or a generation, after their initial bewilderment, look around and improve their social position. They find more agreeable positions, study and use their initiative, even threatening the tranquillity of the average Swiss worker, who is still perched on his stool looking at the Italian who used to wash dishes and may now be sitting in an armchair”.

That’s what makes the portrayal of cross-border workers as rats even more outrageous. It comes in the wake of an unspeakably painful history. There were the armed gangs at Goeschenen in 1875 who fired on and killed Italian labourers at the San Gottardo tunnel protesting at the deaths of 144 companions, killed by dynamite, collapses and gas. There was the Zurich manhunt in 1896, when the authorities had to organise special trains to take terrorised Italians home. There was the closure of the third-class waiting room at Basle to “Italian gypsies” in transit, most of whom came from Piedmont, Lombardy and Veneto. There was the scandalous not guilty verdict for the Mattmark disaster. And there were the racially motivated killings, like Vincenzo Rossi, thrown into a blast furnace by his boss, Attilio Tonola or Alfredo Zardini, beaten to death by a racist who in 1974 was sentenced to 18 months.

Of course, the story of Italians in Italy is much more than this. Large numbers of Italians, some at considerable sacrifice, have integrated very well indeed, earning the respect, friendship and affection of our Swiss neighbours. Despite all the painful memories, like Armando and Giuseppina Colatrella who settled in Lucerne in 1960, worked and paid taxes for half a century only to be refused Swiss citizenship in 2004, it would be unfair not to recall the many positive aspects of Swiss-Italian relations.

But precisely because the light is dappled with shadier areas, there can be no tolerance for the internet images, ready to become a poster campaign across Ticino, that show three labelled rats. The first is a tiler from Verbania called Fabrizio, the second is Bogdan, a layabout from Romania, and the third is an Italian lawyer called Giulio. Just so there are no doubts about his surname, he is carrying a shield with three peaks [Giulio “Tre-monti” is Italy’s finance minister – Ed.]. The trio represents the new threat to Swiss wellbeing: the Italian cross-border worker, the Romanian ne’er-do-well and the Italian minister behind the tax amnesty that is claimed to have hurt Switzerland’s banks. The campaign is entitled: “Bala i ratt...”, “The mice will play”.

For months, La Provincia di Como has been devoting pages to the fears of the 50,000 or so Italians who cross the border to work in Switzerland every day, and who would certainly not have found jobs over the years if there had been no need of them. Here’s a headline: “League Accuses Cross-border Workers of Stealing Jobs. And here’s another: “Clampdown in Ticino –. No More Nurses from Como”. The rat campaign on the www.balairatt.ch website goes further even than the posters showing white sheep kicking a black sheep out of Switzerland, released by the SVP (UDC in French and Italian-speaking cantons). This is the party of Christoph Blocher, a man noted for saying that article 261b of the Swiss penal code, which sanctions racial discrimination and Holocaust denial, gave him indigestion.

For the time being, Ticino League supporters are hanging fire but some canton deputies like Pierre Rusconi not only agree but even hope that this will be the focus of the next election campaign. People of Freedom deputy and mayor of Verbania Marco Zacchera has already tabled a question in the Italian parliament, asking whether the government believes that “this campaign has an evidently demagogic and even racist tone, and is in stark contrast with Italian-Swiss agreements currently in force”.

Here’s a final note. Michele Ferrise, the man who created the campaign, said that his unnamed client asked him “to find an original idea that would open the eyes of Ticino residents to certain issues” and that he had chosen rats because “rats are despicable“ and suggest the concept of “rat extermination”. There can be little doubt that it is racist, if not terribly original. A century ago, the American magazine Judge published a cartoon showing a disconsolate Uncle Sam watching thousands of rats leave a ship arriving “direct from the slums of Europe”. Written on the hats of the moustachioed rats, or on the knives they have between their teeth, is “Mafia”, “Anarchy” and “Murder”.

A hundred years have passed and thanks to the likes of Mr Ferrise and his clients, we Italians still have to put up with the same old filth.

English translation by Giles Watson

www.watson.it