Italy neutral ww2 + jews

Autocracies (forcibly) moved peoples around all the time if they thought it was to their benefit, going back to Nebuchadnezzar and beyond. Nothing ASB about it.

I suggest you focus on the 1930s, and not about moving people within one's borders, or about dumping people onto other countries. The point is about accepting 500,000 foreigners per year, for 8 years in a row. Think about it. It's just not happening.

To provide you with the basics for a comparison, the USA - a country numbering 131 million inhabitants in 1939 - welcomed just shy of 700,000 newcomers in the ten years 1930-1939. And there was a lot of opposition, a lot of pressure to reduce the numbers of those damn immigrants. This in a country that was born and built on immigration, a democracy, as progressive as you get them for that time.

That said, yeah, "if they thought it was to their benefit". We're talking about a nationalist regime here. Assuming they had the money, the capability and the vision to send people to good fertile land in the Ethiopian highlands (to be accompanied by significant protection against unfriendly locals, naturally, it's not as if the guerrilla was over in 1936) who do you think they'd reckon it was to their benefit to send?

Italian landless peasants, that's who. Not some Germans and Poles. Sending the latter, even in manageable, realistic numbers instead of the absurd millions, would be commented as: "Our boys conquered a colony for us at the price of their blood, and now Mussolini is stealing the best lands there and handing them out to foreigners". Mussolini was an autocrat, but he was keenly aware of public opinion.
 
That's the keyword. Would sending them to the colonies, possibly to displace natives, count as "allowing in"?

The ASB part is the number. Perhaps a few hundred thousand (and with a few caveats) would have been feasible.

Agreed on the latter.
As to the former, yes, that's "allowing them in" too. Remember, the official reason for conquering Ethiopia was that foreign powers had already their own colonial empires, and Italy had been sidetracked in 1918 notwithstanding its rightful claims as a winner in WWI. We have gained our "place in the sun", finally, Fascism has conquered it for Italy. The general idea is to have those destitute, landless Italian peasants, day laborers who lived hand to mouth in the poorest areas of the countryside, to become land-owning colonists. This was already happening in Italy (in lands reclaimed from swamps) and in coastal Libya. The same should have happened in Ethiopia.

And now foreigners are in through the backdoor? And taking that place in the sun? Not happening.
 
Agreed on the latter.
As to the former, yes, that's "allowing them in" too. Remember, the official reason for conquering Ethiopia was that foreign powers had already their own colonial empires, and Italy had been sidetracked in 1918 notwithstanding its rightful claims as a winner in WWI. We have gained our "place in the sun", finally, Fascism has conquered it for Italy. The general idea is to have those destitute, landless Italian peasants, day laborers who lived hand to mouth in the poorest areas of the countryside, to become land-owning colonists. This was already happening in Italy (in lands reclaimed from swamps) and in coastal Libya. The same should have happened in Ethiopia.

And now foreigners are in through the backdoor? And taking that place in the sun? Not happening.

Let's have a look at the numbers, shall we? According to this table, the local population was
17.7 millions in 1940. Italian residents in the same year were 40'000, plus 200'000 temporary labourers. If you also look at the scary growth rate, it's clear they need all the help they can get, especially from people who have hardly anywhere else to go and are unlikely to turn against them.

Plus, we aren't talking about Libya here. No fourth shore, so lesser concern about being swamped by foreigners.

France did something of the sort in Algeria, pretty much giving citizenship to any European who wanted to stay there (which, by the way, was still a factor during the war in the 50s, but that's another story).
 
Let's have a look at the numbers, shall we? According to this table, the local population was
17.7 millions in 1940. Italian residents in the same year were 40'000, plus 200'000 temporary labourers. If you also look at the scary growth rate, it's clear they need all the help they can get, especially from people who have hardly anywhere else to go and are unlikely to turn against them.

Plus, we aren't talking about Libya here. No fourth shore, so lesser concern about being swamped by foreigners.

France did something of the sort in Algeria, pretty much giving citizenship to any European who wanted to stay there (which, by the way, was still a factor during the war in the 50s, but that's another story).

I'm not arguing that from a cold-eyed, logical standpoint this wouldn't work. A present-day demography statistics student would agree.
I'm saying that this wouldn't work in any country in the 1930s, and in particular not in Italy.
 
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