What was Italy's Immigration Debate in 2018 about?

Italian culture will be ruined by immigration

Question: What was Italy's Immigration Debate in 2018 about?
Position‹3 of 3: Italy's immigration debate was about halting immigration
Argument‹2 of 2: Italian culture will be ruined by immigration

"If we allow immigrants to live among us, we’ll lose our identity"

The argument

One strand of Italy's 2018 immigration debate framed the question as one of cultural survival rather than of economics or border management, and argued on that basis for halting immigration. The reasoning began from a particular understanding of what holds a nation together. On this account Italy's national identity is not a legal status or a set of institutions but something carried in its traditions and life-style, the practices, customs and habits that Italians share and that distinguish them from other peoples. Identity so understood is not permanent by default. It persists only as long as it is preserved and passed on, which makes it vulnerable in a way that citizenship or territory are not. From this followed the claim about immigration. If Italians allow immigrants to live among them, proponents argued, they will be contaminated by foreign cultures, and what emerges will not be a richer Italy but a diluted one: a mass of confused people without a strong identity of their own, uncertain what they belong to or what their traditions ask of them. The final step gave the argument its urgency. A population that has lost a shared identity was held to be defenceless in a specific way. With nothing holding it together and no common frame of reference to appeal to, it would be easy to be dominated by those who hold the economic power, since there would be no collective sense of itself capable of resisting them. Cultural dissolution was presented not merely as a loss in itself but as the prelude to a loss of self-government. Those making this case therefore treated immigration as a question of national survival rather than of policy detail, and concluded that what the debate was properly about was halting it.

Context

This argument is supported by various extreme-right and neo-fascist parties

Premises

[P1]Italy's national identity depends on preserving its traditions and way of life. [P2] Allowing immigrants to live among Italians would contaminate that culture with foreign ones. [P3] The result would be a confused people without a strong identity, easily dominated by whoever holds economic power. [C] Therefore, because Italian culture would be ruined by immigration, Italy's immigration debate was about halting immigration.

Counter-arguments

Culture is a constantly-changing unicum, not a given item that must be passively took on. The authors of this argument also fail to remember that Italy doesn't have a fixed culture or identity - it's the result of many coexisting cultures and subcultures. Besides, it's not possible to have no identity. Humans are constantly shaped by the cultures and subcultures they inhabit. It’s good to preserve the memory of Italian traditions, but this doesn’t mean that those traditions must be continued, especially those in direct contrast with human rights (see the problem of traditional families against LGBT+ rights) or animal rights (Italy has a tradition of bullfighting, but nobody does that anymore). Also, how can anybody be sure that his/her grandparents' old life-style is better than others?

Rejecting the premises

The Italian language and culture already are the result of a co-existance of cultures, and identity is a constant process - it can't be "destroyed".