ROME — The former national secretary of the Italian Radicals has confirmed his party received $298,000 in 2017 from George Soros’ Open Society foundations for the purpose of promoting international immigration.

Riccardo Magi, former secretary of Emma Bonino’s globalist Radical party and now deputy of +Europa, said that the financing came from the multi-billionaire “to promote a wide-ranging reform of Italian immigration laws through initiatives aimed at providing aid to immigrants and advancing their social well-being.”

In essence, Italian media reported, the funding was aimed at procuring the 90 thousand signatures necessary to guarantee the advance of an immigration bill titled “I was a stranger — humanity doing good.”

“Bossi-Fini,” Magi said in reference to Italy’s current immigration law, “has produced half a billion irregular workers in Italy. With our law, filed at the end of the last legislature but not yet tabled, we ask that there be regular entry channels, we want to reconcile supply and demand for labor.”

“It is urgent to regularize and integrate foreigners, I am not talking about amnesty, obviously,” Mr. Magi said. “People are chasing after the specter of Soros and do not see what the real anti-democratic forces in Italy are.”

“Salvini had said that in 5 years he would have repatriated 500,000 irregular immigrants: in fact, in just one year he repatriated only 5,000,” Magi added. “So what do we want to do? Why not regularize anybody who has an employer ready to hire him?”

The MEP said he was proud to receive funding from Soros, insisting that it is much better than being friends with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

“Much better to receive support from Soros than to be friends with Orbán,” Magi said.

“I fully acknowledge the financing received, it is a point of pride,” he said. “Others, like the League, seem to have benefited from clandestine funds from Russian emissaries. Ours was an operation in the light of the day; it’s all accounted for.”

Despite the enormity of the sums received by the radicals, the financing represents just a fraction of Soros’ investments for immigration in Italy.

In just one year (2017-2018), the leftist disrupter gave a total of $8.5 million to political parties, associations, and NGO’s operating in Italy to advance his immigration agenda, reports state.

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