The Associated Press
Sunday, November 4, 2007

ROME: The opposition leader Silvio Berlusconi urged Italian officials to close the country’s borders to Romanian workers, and a conservative ally called Sunday for the expulsion of tens of thousands of immigrants amid public outrage over a wave of violent crimes blamed on foreigners.
Pope Benedict XVI added his voice to the debate over the balance between citizen safety and treatment of foreigners, reminding the Italian authorities that immigrants have obligations - and rights.

The pope weighed in as lawmakers prepared to debate the government’s response to recent crime, including fast-track expulsions of Romanians and other EU citizens deemed dangerous, and bulldozing shantytowns that housed immigrants.

“In Rome alone, 20,000 expulsions should be carried out right away,” the rightist leader Gianfranco Fini, a key Berlusconi ally, said on a television talk show Sunday.

Berlusconi urged in the newspaper La Stampa that Italy enact a moratorium against the entry of Romanian workers.

“If I were in the government, I would have done it,” the former prime minister said.

Last week, the cabinet approved a decree giving the authorities the power to expel EU citizens with criminal records or those deemed dangerous to public safety.

The decree needs approval in Parliament - where Prime Minister Romano Prodi’s center-left coalition has a narrow majority - to remain in effect longer than a few months.

Berlusconi said he was weighing whether his conservative lawmakers should vote to approve the decree. Fini said his political forces would vote for it only if expulsions were expanded to include EU citizens without a means to support themselves.

The Italian authorities have said statistics show that foreigners commit a disproportionate number of crimes in Italy, and the mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni, said that 75 percent of arrests in the city in the last year involved Romanians.

Nationwide, less than 5 percent of the Italian population in 2004 - before Romania joined the EU - was foreign, while noncitizens accounted for 26 percent of those convicted of crimes.

Romanians have been detained as suspects in several recent high-profile crimes, including the rape of a woman on church steps in northern Italy, a Tiber River bank mugging that left a Rome cyclist in a coma for weeks before he died, and the robbery of a Milan coffee bar in which the elderly owner was beaten and her daughter raped.

Other recent crimes in which foreigners are suspected include the mugging of the film director Giuseppe Tornatore, which sent him to the hospital; the holdup of a prominent TV anchor; and the mugging of a Rome municipal commissioner.

The savage beating last week of the wife of an Italian naval commander prompted the emergency decree. A Romanian was arrested in connection with the assault.

The wave of attacks also has set off a backlash against foreigners. Police officers searched for several Italians who, with clubs and knives, wounded three Romanians in a Rome parking lot on Friday night.