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Europe|Laborer’s Death Brings to Light Italy’s Conflicted Relationship With Migrants
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/28/world/europe/italy-migrant-labor.html
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Italy, an aging country, badly needs migrant labor and immigration, but the government has admitted that the pathways for legal entry are rife with abuse.
By Emma Bubola
Emma Bubola reported from the Agro Pontino farmlands, where she interviewed the Indian fruit pickers who work in the fields.
Sept. 28, 2024, 12:01 a.m. ET
When Satnam Singh, a migrant fruit picker from India, chopped his arm off in an accident in June as he worked in fields near Rome, his boss, instead of taking Mr. Singh to a hospital, dropped him off in front of his house with part of his arm in a fruit basket. Shortly afterward, Mr. Singh died.
He had arrived in Italy in 2021 from the Punjab region on a temporary worker’s permit, then remained working illegally for more than two years, hoping in vain that an employer would legalize him, the police said. Instead, he found himself, like so many other migrants, ground up in a nearly feudal system that offers scant protections to some of Italy’s most necessary workers.
Mr. Singh’s death, at 31, stirred an uproar in Italy this summer, setting off a new round of soul-searching about the country’s conflicted relationship with immigrants.
Italy, with its aging and dwindling population, desperately needs foreign workers, but the public discourse has been dominated for years by talk of how to keep migrants away. Now, even those who had warned of “ethnic replacement” of Italians by foreigners, including Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, have acknowledged the need for immigrant labor.
Her government has vowed to improve pathways for migrants to work legally in Italy, a system that experts and Ms. Meloni herself have said is rife with abuse, leaving many vulnerable to exploitation and blackmail.
“Satnam is the symbol of a system,” said Marco Omizzolo, a sociologist who for years has focused on migrant workers in the vast Agro Pontino farmlands in the central Lazio region, where Mr. Singh died.
