Italy’s Interior Minister Threatens to Take Census of Roma People and Expel Non-Italians

Italy’s new interior minister—who made headlines last week when he refused to allow a ship carrying 629 migrants to dock in the country—has ordered a census of Italy’s Roma community, with the ultimate aim of deporting all non-Italian Roma people. On Monday, Matteo Salvini ordered the census and the removal of all non-Italian Roma—which he called an “answer to the Roma question”—and added that he wanted to know “who, and how many” Roma people there were in the country. “Unfortunately, we will have to keep the Italian Roma because we can’t expel them,” Salvini said on Telelombardia. Salvini comments were compared by Roberto Malini at the Everyone Group, a charity that campaigns for minority group rights, to Nazi propaganda. “These words, and the call for a register of Gypsies, takes us back to the beginnings of Nazism,” he said.