IMMIGRATION: who is the real rich?

IMMIGRATION is a very delicated topic and it has been one of main theme during the last months for Italian policy and parties. In Italy and in the EU (European Union) a lot of parties took power hindering all the migrants coming from Africa and a lot of other countries: Siria and Afghanistan.
In today's post I want to talk about a conversation that I had in Lampedusa during my summer holidays: here I found a person with a complete different point of view from a lot of other Italian citizens. I hope to read a lot of your replies here, under this tale.
At Lampedusa, the southest Italian island, in the middle of Mediterranean Sea, I met the owner of the house where I lived for a week: his name was Abel and he was 60 years old. He told me that the number of people who usually live all the year on the island are almost 6 thousends and he was one of them.

During a very hot afternoon, under the shadow of a palm, I started to talk with him: I am usually a person who loves talking a lot and asking all the things I think. So I asked him how a person who lives every day on the island can survive with all the migrants who arrive there: Lampedusa is very small and I want to be honest telling you, my readers, that I was curious to know where they were, but I did not see nothing. Newspapers and TV news always tell us that there are a lot of migrants on the island and a lot of African boats come from Libya and Tunisia.

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Many military facilities to which it was expressly and clearly forbidden to take pictures, but none of which were designed to contain migrants, at least in large quantities as described and read everywhere. No Africans anywhere: whether they were Tunisians, Moroccans or Senegaleses. Nothing at all. And then I began to have some doubts:
do these migrants really exist on the island?
So I decided to ask to Abel where these migrants live. He answers me with a dry answer that displaces me:

Do you see any migrant?

Obviusly I was shocked and destabilized by his questioning answer.

On this island there are not migrants. No one. Or at least, they are only a small part compared to what the mass-media usually tell you. News papers and TV news have destroyed us on a global point of view and have destroyed tourism that is "afraid by the migrants' plight". As you have been able to see, there are no refugees on the loose.

Those few, he told me, reside in the area of the airport, but their time of permanence here is very short, since they stop very little in Lampedusa and are taken in a few hours or days in Sicily.
Abel also told me that this problem was much more pressing and hard for Lampedusa a few years ago (about 30 y.), when migrants stopped for a long time on the island. They had also reached over 10k and therefore almost doubled the island's indigenous population.
The problems arising during those years were huge for Lampedusa: the migrants without anything found themselves wandering among the houses, asking for help from the Lampedusa themselves. Unfortunately, the island became in a short time, Abel continues, an open-air latrine with all these refugees alone.
The Lampedusans, however, were not far behind and even they found themselves very brest to have to deal with this mass of migrants left by the state to the fray. A State that delegated all kinds of responsibility and risk to a poor population of just 6,000 people.

One day I found two Tunisians wandering in my garden. They knocked at my door and made me feel sorry. I welcomed them into the house, said them a meal and gave them some blankets, since it was October, and even though the island is rather south, it was getting cold. I was the best I could give, but I did it with pleasure.

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Abel's word were full of pietas and these let me understand immediatly how Lampedusan mentality was very far from mine, the north one, where newspapers usually push me to close the door when I saw two strangers, who came under my house to ask my help. Probably someone knows this mentality as racism, but I do not think that I am racist, on the contrary I think to be complitely different: I have a lot of friends coming from other ethinic group and with different skin colours. My reaction would be the result of a fear built by some (strange) mind, very far from Lampedusan one who was described by Abel.
I tried to explain this to my partner on the island and he replied to me:

You know, my friend, Lampedusa is an island that has survived thanks to the sea. Here the biggest occupation is the fisherman. So the sea is our creator and thanks to him we, my parents and the parents of my parents, survived. But the sea must always be respected. You must respect when it gives you the fish to eat, but in particular when it does not give you anything. And also when it gives to you people who are looking for help.
Nobody should fall on a boat in the middle of the sea without a safe destination. Without knowing if he will see his family or a new land. Unless that would be his last chance. The last chance even if it is leave everything and strating to hope.
We must give them our help!

Abel's words hit me deeply and let me understand that he did not have great things or a lot of money 30 years ago but however he helped them. He wanted to help them.
In Lampedusa, during my trip, I understood that I come back home richer than before.
This is a travel that I love and where I am able to know different people with different point of view.
I come back home richer of humanity that is not possible to teach, but it is possible to learn.

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