Governments and institutions have a duty to inform and reassure citizens on migration to combat racism and fear of migrants stoked by populism, Italy's foreign minister Angelino Alfano said on Tuesday.
"We need to fight the forms of populism that exploit the issue of migration to spread fear and make easy political capital," Alfano told a conference in Rome on migration to Europe.
"We have the crucial task of reassuring our citizens about migration in order to oppose populism and racism and safeguard support for the European Union and legal immigration," Alfano added.