CUL-DE-SAC

The animated sounds of Italian and American English rose and fell as I walked around the Italian Cultural Center in San Diego’s “Little Italy.” The mood was festive. We were waiting for the Italian General Consul of Southern California to show up. He was late of course.

The Americans, at least, were here to apply for passports. Italian passports. They had spent time digging through vital statistics and immigration records to prove their Italian heritage. That’s what it takes to convince a willing Italian government that you should be made a citizen of that country.

Roberto Ruocco

It was a sample of what’s going on with European countries, of dwindling populations, who are looking to the lost souls of their diaspora to beef up the nation with that good old native blood.

The man at the hub of the scene at the cultural center was a charming Neapolitan and former Italian air force colonel named Roberto Ruocco. He cheerfully passed out numbers to applicants to indicate their turn with the consular official.

Ruocco is a great salesman when it comes to encouraging Americans to apply for Italian citizenship. Upon learning my wife’s great grandparents came from Naples, he quickly emailed me a form that Karen could fill out to get the process started.

From the American standpoint, why not become an Italian citizen? It applies to you and your offspring. It means you (and they) can work there, study there, buy property, vote and travel freely. And not only that. As an Italian citizen you’re free to seek employment throughout the EU.

To the nation of Italy, according to Roberto, it’s a chance to reclaim families who left generations ago, who went on to become educated professionals in the U.S. It’s also a chance to enhance the population of a country with a dangerously low birthrate. Whether that scheme will actually work is another question.

It’s amazing to watch the dilemma of the developed world, in just about every country outside the U.S., as they struggle for their future in a place where couples, on average, are having not much more than one child each. The same dilemma is seen in Spain, Germany, Italy, Japan and South Korea.

Their birthrate is a recipe for extinction. But opening the gates to unbridled immigration is not a solution… at least not for Europe or East Asia. Their identity and citizenship is bound to the ethnic blood. If Italy were flooded with immigrants from North Africa, they wouldn’t know what to do with them because, well, they’re just not Italian! Much better, they think, to beckon the right kind of foreigners with familiar-sounding surnames.

I spoke about this with an academic named John Skrentny, whose UC San Diego office had a view of the Pacific Ocean. Skrentny studies immigration policy, and he thought that trying solve Italy’s huge demographic challenge by encouraging ethnic Italians to move “back home” seemed a little desperate.

They may be named Rossi and LaRuccia, but Italian Americans enter a foreign land when they go to Italy. My experience talking to Americans who got Italian passports tells me that they found it a fun adventure, and they liked the idea of being able to travel around Europe hassle-free. But none of them saw Italy as their land of opportunity. Thanks, but they already live in that place.

If Italy is going to survive without becoming an immigrant nation, then it needs to start having more babies. But people in modern societies with industrial, knowedge-based economies and generous welfare systems see no real incentive to have kids. Throw in the fact of near-flawless contraception, then super-low birthrates are virtually guaranteed.

You don’t need kids these days to help out on the farm because we don’t live on farms anymore. Child labor is frowned upon. You have to put kids though college, and that’s expensive. And good pension benefits mean you don’t need them to look after you when you get old. God knows you love your kids when you have them, but that’s not enough to convince people to have enough children to sustain the population.

Meanwhile, Italy is scouring the globe in the hopes that people of Italian heritage may actually want to move back the land of Michelangelo.

There was a time when your family looked out for you. You relied not just on your parents, but on your children. Countries still rely on the coming generation to keep the place going and pay our pensions. So maybe people need to see their whole country as one big family.

Good luck with that.

It was a Sunday afternoon when I was watching my kids. My wife was out-of-town, and I’d gotten the idea to take them to lunch at the Living Room, a trendy neighborhood coffee shop.

That’s when the arguments began. My kids didn’t want to go. I told them they’d watched enough TV and played enough video games and they needed to get out of the house.

The Living Room

Then I insisted we walk or bicycle to the coffee shop, since it was only a half mile away with no major streets between us and it. They hadn’t gotten any outdoor exercise that day.

My daughter threatened she wouldn’t go unless we took the car. I told her we’d go the way I said we’d go, dammit!

Once we got to the place and got some food things went better. And as we were leaving, a woman seated outside caught my eye then looked at my kids.

“You’ve got such a cool dad!” she said. “He takes you to the Living Room, which is the greatest place.”

My daughter stared ahead as she sat on her bike, taken aback by the woman’s bizarre pronouncements and not knowing what to say in response.

Then the woman looked at what I had under my arm. A skateboard.

“And he rode here with you on his skateboard? What a totally cool dad!! You guys are so lucky!”

I said thanks, a little sheepishly, then started on the way home. My kids lingered behind and may have exchanged a few words with her.

Life continued the rest of the day as usual. And I wondered whether and how my children will remember the day they were told they were lucky to have me as a dad.

I have to stop and think to remember when I stopped worrying about money. It was about four years after my second child was born, when my wife got a part-time but benefitted job with the San Diego Public Library.

At the time we had a small house and a small mortgage (by San Diego standards). Life was pretty cheap but we still had to think about every purchase. Anything costly — a piece of furniture, a night in a hotel, a modest home improvement — would set us back. We got a home equity credit card to help make ends meet.

But when Karen got her benefitted job, we stopped brooding over every purchase. Suddenly, it didn’t matter how much a gallon of milk cost or what the next utility bill was going to be.

I’ve thought of this after being part of a Marketplace broadcast that examined the reality of being rich and poor in San Diego. I spoke with a woman who lived in her car. A poor family of four told us of the daily task of deciding what they would choose to do without.

Despite the title of this post I’ve never been poor in any meaningful sense. But there have been times when I thought about money a lot, when I knew exactly what it cost every month to pay my phone and utility bills. Any time I saw those prices rise dramatically I’d study the bill, hoping the change was due to some reckoning error. I used to sell my blood plasma to earn a few extra bucks.

But it all came to an end for me. And maybe that’s typical of the young and middle class. The true poor can’t take vacations from being poor, and they can’t see a time when it will stop.

So I try to remember the humiliation of not having enough money. I try to remember the day, in my early 20s, when my parents gave me some cash to help pay my bills and I cried, because I was so ashamed.

Rich people may remember a time when they had less and it was romantic because they were young, but they’ve used their wiles and hard work since then to do better… or so they believe. Being poor is not a romance when it doesn’t go away.