On the ghetto classes the left has denied and gifted the right a progressive battle

Indeed, the government's proposal to cap foreigners at 30% per class, limited to those not born in Italy and without a minimum prior attendance at an Italian school, adapts an anti-segregationist measure to a crypto-racist (and not so crypto-racist) propaganda purpose: no to the invasion of classrooms by non-Italian brats, who disrupt the serenity and jeopardize the learning of the country's children. "Our school. The cap on foreigners in the classroom is law," was the headline in Il Giornale yesterday. Exactly.

This racist use of a historically and conceptually anti-racist measure does not make its purpose just, but neither does it make its merit unjust. We must be able to distinguish the content of a law from the way it is exploited, distorted, and prostituted for purposes contrary to its very meaning and the concrete effects of its application.

However, this ability, which is an indispensable intellectual and moral skill of the political profession, seems to have almost disappeared from the Italian left and, in the small, silenced minorities where it still persists, regularly ends up classified by the noisy majorities under the heading of betrayal and collusion with the enemy.

The result, in this case, is that the Pavlovian dogs of the left—who would start growling even if Giorgia Meloni went mad and declared herself devoted to Enrico Berlinguer—have gifted post-fascists and fascists 2.0 an anti-discrimination proposal and, rather than contest its manipulation, have ended up repudiating its historically progressive meaning and accrediting its reactionary one.

The principle of balanced distribution of students of foreign origin, to avoid segregated schools or classes, originally belongs, both in international tradition and in early Italian legislation, to policies of integration, inclusion, and anti-segregation. In Italy, the principle was enshrined in 1999 by Massimo D'Alema's center-left government and confirmed in 2007 by Romano Prodi's government as a cornerstone of the "Italian path to intercultural education."

In 2010, under Silvio Berlusconi's government, that principle was translated into a quantitative threshold, establishing that, where possible, the number of students with non-Italian citizenship and limited language skills should not exceed 30% of those enrolled in each class and each school. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development explicitly classified the Italian 30% ceiling in the category of "Affirmative Action and upper thresholds to enhance social mix," that is, among the tools aimed at increasing social mix and combating segregation.

The provision inserted by Meloni into the school decree thus legislates a law that should already govern school organization, and which is and will remain difficult to enforce, especially in areas with a high immigrant population. It doesn't even make the 30% cap truly mandatory, so the decree provides for the same exemptions already recognized today. In other words, it serves virtually no purpose other than to renew the bad habit of using legislative activity for propaganda and fraud.

The broad opposition, however, has not made these criticisms and has not exposed the xenophobic advertising that accompanied the executive's mediocre regulatory maneuvering, but has even strengthened it, confirming that the 30% cap really serves to "expel foreign children from classrooms" and inaugurate "a new witch hunt on the backs of the youngest" (according to Elly Schlein). In short, a fine fight in the mud of AC Milan's charlatanism.

Contrary to what the right promises, foreign minors are destined to thrive in Italian schools. Moreover, without them, the entire school system would collapse economically and organizationally far more than currently foreseen. By 2050, approximately one in four students in Italian schools will be missing: from approximately eight million to just over six million. Of these, a third will be of foreign origin.

In this scenario, the challenge is precisely how to prevent school segregation and self-segregation, given the highly insidious phenomena of territorial concentration from a civil perspective. A truly progressive left would urge institutions to address the challenge of integration and certainly not idealize, as the demopopulist left does, neighborhoods for foreigners and schools for foreigners as models of interculturality.