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To Silvio Berlusconi

Palazzo del Quirinale

Rome, Italy

Ciao, Silvio,

I see you are doing something about those troublesome ethnic minorities. As a Canadian, I can only commiserate: We have been through this before, decades ago, and one ethnic group in particular gave us a lot of trouble. I hope our history can offer you some lessons.

I'm inspired to see that you're doing something serious about the hundreds of thousands of people who have immigrated to Italy to pick the tomatoes, clean the toilets and take care of the grandparents of your voters. You have described these non-Italians in Italy as an “army of evil.” Your Foreign Minister wants to make it a crime, punishable with imprisonment, simply to be an immigrant working in Italy “without papers.”

Now, that's a phrase we remember well in Canada.

You have been getting a lot of international attention lately for your novel program of sending squads of police to fingerprint the Roma minority group.

We used to fingerprint our minorities as well – one group in particular, whom our government made a point of cataloguing and culling before they even got on the boat!

Likewise your new program to perform DNA tests on family members of immigrants. It's to make sure no non-kin are sneaking in, you say. Sure, with today's family structures you're bound to create misery for some adopted children, stepchildren and whatnot. But what's a few shattered families if policy harmony is to be preserved?

And best of all are the detention camps, or “holding centres,” you're building to hold those “without papers” immigrants for up to 18 months. We know all about detention centres.

Your Foreign Minister, Franco Frattini, has let us in on the next step: In an interview with the newspaper Il Messaggero, he said he might support the expansion of digital fingerprinting to include European immigrants in Italy who come from recent European Union member countries – notably Romania.

This is a proud endorsement of one of your big ideas: During your election campaign, you repeatedly said Romanian immigration should be banned and the border closed.

You've already made life extremely difficult for the Romanians, keeping the police on their backs. It's working: Many are turning back. Sure, you're getting complaints from thousands of elderly people who had become dependent on the nice Romanian girls who fed and bathed them.

But we understand, even if they don't.

We had a serious problem with just such an immigrant group. They started coming into Canada at the beginning of the 20th century and, though our federal government declared them “non-preferred” and ineligible for admission, tens of thousands of them still arrived every year. Like yours, our companies and farms kept hiring them!

We had real problems with this group's strange, ultra-religious customs. Their women often wore religious head coverings. They were widely thought to be terrorists – in fact, some of them were terrorists. They acted strange, didn't blend in with the population and cooked strange-smelling food.

Our federal government responded much as you have. Laval Fortier, our commissioner for overseas immigration in the early 1950s, reported to the government that “the Italian peasant … is not the type we are looking for in Canada. His standard of living, his way of life, even his civilization seems so different that I doubt if he could ever become an asset to our country.”

The Anglican Church of Canada, which played a big role in policy then, warned in a report that Italians were probably impossible to integrate into an English-speaking society and cautioned that they were “amenable to the fallacies of dictatorship.”

The government warned that the southerners tend to be fascist, the northerners communist – thus placing them on both poles of that period's Axis of Evil.

During the war, we put about 1 per cent of them in detention camps, such as in Petawawa, Ont. But Mitchell Hepburn, the premier of our largest province, warned that all the rest were “potential enemies” who should not be allowed to work. One influential report suggested that Canada is “a country suitable for white settlement,” a category from which Italians were specifically excluded.

It didn't work. In industry, we seemed to be stuck with them. Starting in the 1950s, our employers instituted a system of “bulk orders” for Italians by the thousands to work on farms, on railway lines and in factories.

And just as you are discovering, these immigrants actually moved into our cities and set up their own neighbourhoods, full of their strange smells and odd, unpopular food.

Canada then, like Italy now, had a lot of old people to take care of. And, like you, we needed to have our houses cleaned. “We could do with some Italian girls as domestics,” one of our senior officials wrote in 1951, “but there is a very definite view amongst immigration officials that immigration from Italy is not desirable.”

I bet you're getting this kind of pressure from bleeding hearts in your country. But in Canada the market won out, and soon thousands and thousands of Italian women were arriving.

As Canadian historian Franca Iacovetta has documented, these women were widely seen in official reports as being “ignorant of North American standards of personal hygiene and cleanliness.”

No doubt you find that your Romanians have all those qualities, and perhaps you'll be able to detain even more of them. Silvio, we tried. But they overwhelmed us: In 1958, a Progressive Conservative government made the last legislative attempt to solve the Italian problem – a law to restrict family immigration to immediate family members. Just as you're doing in Italy now!

But it died after a couple of years. Those troublesome immigrants had become voters, citizens and politicians. Today, we are beaten.

When my own children look at pictures of their great-grandmother, an Italian immigrant, and they learn that she had to report to the RCMP every week for six years because she lived in a suspect building, I have to assure them they will not encounter that sort of thing now.

Unless, that is, they happen to be living in Italy.