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[Amara Graps]

scerir:
>that the present birth rate might be 'supported'
>(possibly) by the population of immigrants.

That immigrants thing again. I challenge you to spend time at the Roma
Questura (on the outskirts of Rome) that processes the permessos for the
extracommunitari. The queue begins at 4am. You can experience first-hand
the result of the Bossi-Fini immigration law. Notice how the Questura
uniformly treat the immigrants in the spectrum of people you see
(business suits to field workers) as sub-humans. Those people just want
to work, and they cannot. Don't be surprised if a few might be angry and
engage in petty theft, but that's the minority. Most of extracommunitari
who are not Australians or New Zealanders or Canadians or Americans or
Russians or Chinese (i.e. those who either marry or leave) sell roses,
beg to wash your windshields on street intersections, or sell purses,
because that's all that they can do. They leave the in-fighting and
bickering and backstabbing and distrust and larger-scale thefts to the
home indigenous crowd.

People like the clerks at Poste Italiane. They are Italians, not
immigrants because immigrants can't get that kind of job. They are
probably 40 years old, living at home, given that job by their uncle and
unable to buy that ¤1,40 liter of milk. They need a Christmas gift for
their girlfriends, and guess what? In front of them are 22 brown padded
envelopes from a person with a Dr. in front of her name, sending to
herself from her address in Italy to an address in the United States.
That means that she is probably rich if she is spending her holiday in
the U.S., and because she doesn't have an Italian name, it's OK if they
slash open 42% of the envelopes. What a disappointment that they only
contain notebooks in English and with numbers and strange math symbols
and doesn't include Rolex watches. Oh, but Italians don't do that. It's
always 'them' and never 'us' who do any of those things. Right?

The firewall at the research area of Tor Vergata is in the strange
configuration that it is because the network is attacked by both people
trying to break in, and spammers working on the inside of the network.
Who do you think is spamming their co-workers, those gypsies selling
roses? Why do you think your cousin doesn't permit any of his
administered computers inside of the network to have passwords and only
allows more secure methods to log in? Why do you think every researcher
except the stranieri (who can't imagine that one needs to lock their
door against their co-workers) locks their door when they go to lunch?
Who do you think stole that van full of solar physics sensing equipment
that left in broad daylight from CNR? Immigrants? No, those people were
probably lost in the black hole of the Questura in a queue trying to get
a permesso. Italians did that. Your us', not 'them'.

Please spend some time to watch the large number of the researchers
waste the meager resources because they don't know how to work with each
other and help each other. Ethics be damned, what's most important is to
have your status and if you trample on a few graduate students who
haven't any salaries for the last year because the Italian Space Agency
didn't pay yet the contracts that they signed three years ago, so what?
Graduate students and post docs are expendable resources. Whatever
happens to them, it doesn't matter, because their Italian families will
pick up the pieces. There will be more to take their places when the
young person, who couldn't take it, leaves the field. Then, instead of
300 science students at Rome University out of 50,000 there will be 299.
The other 49,300 students (who are specializing in television media)
will have fewer technical people to check their text. If the journalists
cut out the words of one scientist and write that DNA was found in the
dust of comet Wild 2 on every major newspaper and on three television
networks, few will know the difference. The few scientists in the
country, who do know the difference, won't say a word because they are
only happy that science is on the front page. And when the director of
the observatory, where the poor researcher tried to correct the
journalist, posts the big news of DNA found in the dust of the comet as
Official News of the Observatory**, then so what? Tax-funded Italian
scientists can feed garbage to the scientifically illiterate public with
no violation of ethics. It's normal to Italy, right? The only person who
criticized the observatory director was, in fact, an immigrant, with a
temporary contract, renewed only every year, desperately poor, with no
resources and no Italian family to support her.

So I sincerely hope that a population of immigrants 'supports' the
Italian birth rate. There might be less graffiti on the historical
archeological structures, less trash on the roads, people who are
kinder to each other, trust each other more, and treat each other with
more respect. I will miss very much my friends in Italy, now that
I've moved, but they are unfortunately very much like me and unlike
what I write above and too few in number living there.

Amara

P.S. Is it any wonder that more than 50% of the accomplished work of the
Italian Transhumanists is done by Italians who don't live in the country?
-- 

Amara Graps, PhD      www.amara.com
Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado