Concetto Vecchio: writer and once migrant

Concetto Vecchio was born in Switzerland in 1970 as a child of Italian guest workers. When he was 14 years old, the family moved back to Sicily. Vecchio works as a political journalist for the daily newspaper "Repubblica", is the author of various books and lives in Rome.

In his half-autobiographical, half-historical book "Chase them away!" Concetto Vecchio tells of his parents, ordinary Sicilians, and of other migrants who sought their fortune in Switzerland in the 1960s, but were met with blatant xenophobia, exploited as workers and marginalized as human beings.

Vecchio relentlessly allows the two worlds to collide: that of Schwarzenbach, who is considered the forerunner of today's right-wing populists, and that of the rootless guest workers who brought an economic boom to the neighboring country and yet met with hatred and rejection. As unimaginable as the institutional discrimination and social exclusion of Italians are from today's perspective, the retrospective nevertheless shows that little has changed in terms of the content of the debate.