Rome Caps Foreign Pupils in Classrooms, and a Region That Has Emptied Counts Again

The Italian government has passed a decree capping the number of pupils with a poor command of Italian in each class and banning the burqa and niqab in schools, a measure Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni described as "common-sense tools that do not divide but really help to integrate", the BBC reported. The Guardian reported that critics accuse the government of "running scared" and of courting far-right voters ahead of next year's general election.

The New York Times framed the same measure as an attempt to appease anti-immigrant sentiment while presenting integration as its goal. Deutsche Welle and The Local Italy reported the cabinet's adoption of the decree on Thursday, noting both the cap on foreign pupils and the ban on face coverings.

The dispute is national and political. But its arithmetic falls differently in a region like Basilicata, where the problem foreign demographers describe is not too many children in classrooms but too few — a decline that has closed schools across the interior long before any decree addressed who may sit in them.