The End of the Line

The staff in the Help Center arrange temporary papers, Italian lessons, and health coverage. Too often, however, the nine months comes and goes without a hearing, and they come back to sleep in the station.

“There is one I remember well,” Radicchi says. “On the first day he arrived he was very strong, energetic. He was from Liberia and sleeping on the street just next to the post office. He came here for a week, and we tried to help him but each day you could see him going down.” Then they lost track of him. Radicchi thinks he disappeared into the underworld of selling drugs or black-market goods.

This illustrates the point Cozzolino was trying to make that night on the dark street outside Termini. The new law is known as the Bossi-Fini law after its two right-wing sponsors, Gianfranco Fini, leader of the National Alliance, and Umberto Bossi of the Northern League. It shortens the waiting period for the hearing to thirty days. But Cozzolino, Radicchi, and other critics say there is now too little time to investigate and document claims, which means that otherwise legitimate claimants will inevitably be turned away and issued deportation notices. They will be allowed to appeal only if they return to their country. But few will actually leave.

“So now the number of homeless grows while the number of refugees goes down,” Radicchi says. “The problem is the homeless are now people without documents. They escaped their country and they are scared, and now it’s harder to help them because they don’t have documents. They have nowhere to go. So we will see them here, sleeping in the stations of Italy and on the streets.”