‘Have you eaten today?’ What an incident on an Italian train taught me about EU values

I saw the kind of Europe I want to live in during a small scene on a train from Bologna to Florence in Italy on Saturday (6 June), after listening to top US officials telling us we should be angry and cruel toward immigrants.

In the incident, the train conductor found a man of Indian appearance who was travelling without a ticket.

He was young, tall, and handsome, but rake-thin, fatigued, and with far-away, downcast eyes. He was also physically compliant, but grimly silent in the face of the train guards’ questions.

I presume he felt embarrassed, but I think there was more going on: If he was in Europe illegally, it meant that when the guards handed him to police on the platform in Florence, he might be put on the path to deportation – and God knows what he went through to get here in the first place.

Last summer, I saw guards on the Spanish-French border, with guns and dogs, march a black family, with children, off a train, force them to sit on the platform, and empty their personal belongings out of suitcases onto the floor, while all the other passengers watched the whole thing, compounding their indignity and shame.

But the Italian train guards were different.

The conductor eventually stopped asking for the man’s ID and enquired instead: “Have you eaten today?”. More silence. So he brought him some sandwiches and juice and, as the young man looked through the bag of food, the conductor gently placed his arm on his shoulder, the way Italians sometimes do, to show affection or compassion.

As much as I might have wanted the man to have gotten away with his free journey (I’ve also travelled without a ticket before), the guards were doing their job, enforcing the rule of law, and I do want to live in a Europe where people abide by the rules.

But the way they did it was a far cry from the animosity I saw in Spain and from what the US administration of vice-president JD Vance and “secretary of war” Pete Hegseth want to see here.

Reacting to the case of a British student, Henry Nowak, murdered by a (British-born and British national) Sikh man, Vance said last week on X he wanted to see “righteous anger” against “mass migration”.

Speaking at a D-Day memorial in France on Saturday, Hegseth said he wanted “this generation of war-fighters” to stand up to the “invasion” of migrants and their “dangerous ideologies”.

Leftwing politicians criticised them both, but far-right extremists on X lapped it up, citing the US calls to action – some of them were politicians or influencers, others were groups wearing KKK-type masks and hoods, with swastika-like logos on their banners.

So, as I think back to the man on the train, I hope the Italian police and immigration services show the same humanity as the train guards did, while still applying the law.

And I’m pretty sure the “dangerous ideology” being imported to Europe is not that of a near-zero minority of Islamic radicals, but the state-sponsored violent and racist rage being megaphoned on X and in speech after speech by the increasingly extremist US, whose ‘ICE’ immigration officers have shot dead leftwing Americans on the streets with impunity, as well as brutalising and tearing apart migrant families.

But I am still optimistic that Europe is better than that, despite the rise of noisy, US-fuelled rightwing zealots, and the centrist leaders adopting their rhetoric and ideas in order to win votes.

I believe the quiet majority of ordinary people in the EU want those in need to be treated humanely and that we should start speaking more loudly in defence of the values we hold dear.