Salvini Cuts Budget Of Pro-Immigration Groups

Italy’s populist Interior Minister
Matteo Salvini has announced the implementation of budgetary cuts for
pro-immigration associations. 

After the announcement, Italian
General Confederation of Labour (CGIL) union revealed that they had to lay off
around 5,000 workers due to the funding cuts under Salvini’s security and
migration decree. 

The group has also forecasted a total
of 15,000 layoffs by the end of the year.

CGIL’s Stefano Sabato commented on
the effect of the migration funding cuts:

“At the moment we have come to count
about 5,000 redundancy procedures, to which we are responding with the tools
available, solidarity agreements, fund for wage integration, but our interest
is to be able to restore ordinary social safety nets to cope with the dramatic
situation that in this way we risk not being able to manage.”

“If the Security decree is not
reformed or amended within 12 months, we will still have to launch mass
dismissal procedures,” he added.

CGIL has 5.5 million members and is
currently the second largest trade union in Europe.  Left wing groups complained of less profits
due to the Security Decree which scraps humanitarian residency permits and
allows the authorities to evict squatters.

A few left-wing mayors said that they
would not follow the decree. However, majority of Italians backed Salvini’s
budgetary cuts, with a poll showing that 63 percent of voters support the
Italian Interior minister’s security decree.

In 2016, corruption involving mafia
groups was exposed.  These groups
allegedly pocketed most of the state funds meant for the operation of asylum
centers and charged migrants “protection money”.

During the biennial
assembly of business group Assonime, Innocenzo Cipolletta, the President of the
association, said that Italy’s Fascist regime style of governance has returned.

“Exacerbated political tensions have
returned. Intolerance often prevails over a willingness to (do) the common
good,” said Cipolletta

“We are sadly growing accustomed to
acts of racism and prevarication, while slogans and attitudes of the darkest
period of our country’s history have been dusted off. We thought we had
definitively put the Fascist 20-year rule into the history museums,” he added.