Welcome to North Africa 

“Welcome to North Africa” the driver said to us as he parked outside our accommodation in Brescia last week. Brescia, by the way, is in Italy and not North Africa. We were staying opposite the main station and, unknown to my wife and I, this was considered one of the least safe areas in the city. Our driver, himself a ‘double refugee’ who had fled Iran for the safety of Ukraine to continue his medical studies and then fled Ukraine when a missile exploded very near his accommodation, added that: “It does not look like your own country when there are so many people who do not look like you.” How true.

Where we had parked, standing on the pavement to the exclusion of any local people, were dozens of North African immigrants—all male—in small groups. Getting out of the car it became apparent that, in whatever direction you looked in the square outside the station, it was wall-to-wall men of North African descent. Our driver warned us to take care of our possessions and the triple electronic locks through which we had to pass to get to our room emphasised the situation. Our hosts, I was there to address an international conference, were horrified when we told them where we were staying, but we had chosen this location as opposed to the conference hotel through a combination of poverty and convenience. We wanted to explore the city and the conference hotel was miles away from the conference location, in one of those places which could just as easily be named Costa Fortune on the shores of Lake Garda.

Brescia is a small city of under 200,000 people, easily viewed in its entirety from the castle which sits in the middle of the city from an elevation of several hundred feet. It is a rich city in the prosperous Lombardy region. This makes it a draw for immigrants who arrive in Italy by various routes, including boats on the Mediterranean coast. In fact, Brescia has the largest concentration of immigrants from North Africa in Italy. Naturally, this is not without its problems and Brescia was rocked earlier this century by violence and a series of murders of locals by immigrants, including by North Africans. The situation was so bad that it was reported in The Guardian, and they did not hold back on the grisly details. However, when it came to finding an explanation, inevitably ‘lack of integration’ was the issue. It was those pesky locals again, going and getting themselves stabbed and strangled because they had not been willing accomplices to the transformation of their beautiful, prosperous and historic city into a North African bedlam.

Italian Prime Minister and all-round winner of the European Prime Ministers’ Beauty Contest (men may enter), Giorgia Meloni has advised that Europe should grow its own population by having more children rather than depending on importing a new population. Great rhetoric, but what is she going to do about it? As far as I could see, the immigrants who surrounded us in our area of Brescia were making no useful contribution to the local economy. That would be quite hard given that most of them seemed to be rooted to the same spot from early morning until late at night. Unless ‘loafing about’ has become a new profession, these people could not be making a (legal) living and were presumably eking out the €165 to 186 per month they receive from the Italian government by finding alternative means of support.

To be frank, we had no trouble (I’m a veteran having been mugged in London and pick-pocketed twice in Paris) but, according to those locals with whom I spoke, at least part of their income comes from petty theft. That and the inevitable and ubiquitous selling of sparkly battery-operated things that nobody wants, and individual flowers to diners in restaurants. These folk are a constant hazard and not easily dismissed when you eat al fresco in any piazza in Italy. There are also straightforward beggars, but I am convinced that part of these people’s jobs is to scout for unattended mobile phones, open bags and to serve as a distraction while you are relieved of your property. One thing is for sure, they are all North African. We were treated, on our first night, to a massive street fight outside our room, but this was not repeated. We were not sure who was involved in the fight as we did not dare to take a look. Perhaps the local skinheads who made their presence known in graffiti around the town had decided to get involved in a bit of free cultural education classes for the inhabitants of Piazza Stazione.

I think I may have glimpsed the future, by which I mean that I can easily envisage this transformation of many of our cities in the UK. It is already a problem in some areas but what I witnessed in Brescia seemed akin to colonisation rather than simply a presence of one particular ethnic group. Presumably, a large part of the problem in Italy arises due to the existence of Europe without borders, once you enter, meaning men of North African descent can congregate in their favourite places with relative ease. We still have an effective border to the UK called the English Channel, but it is far from perfect as witnessed by the thousands of illegal immigrants arriving unabated annually on small (and some not so small) boats. The irony is that if we become truly overrun with one particular group of immigrants in the way Brescia has, they will not be coming to my home town of Hull or poorer cities like Hartlepool or Lesmahagow (Scotland’s poorest town). They will be congregating in the prosperous towns where the Guardianista flourish, and from whence they lecture the rest of us on our attitude towards immigrants both legal and illegal.

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.