Hello,everybody! I'm Roxana from B2 course and I'd like to write my opinion about the article. First of all,I didn't understand if it is about race riots or the mafia or the immigration.However,inquiry shows that 'NDRANGHETA seems not to be involved in the Rosarno case.The Calabrian mafia is now considered Italy's strongest and most impenetrable ,they use less traumatic and less noisy methods ,because they don't want even more police in the area . Rosarno is a citrus -growing area and is experiencing its own economic crisis.The sudden unemployment of hundreds of this illegals is what provoked the riot.The economic crisis lead to racial tensions ,there are no jobs for locals ,those ,white youths'.People think that Africans are stealing jobs from Italians, as British people think Italians are stealing their jobs ,because they work at a wage lower than British people,but it's also true that this kind of job,as many others,is a job that many Italians see as beneath them . Hundred of immigrants live in what human rights groups describe as subhuman conditions .They are often paid less than E30 a day for picking fruit .But nobody forced them to come .Unfortunatelly,many Italian economic realities are based on the exploatation of low-cost foreign labor.
Hi! I agree with Roxana especially with the comment about the cause of the riot. It's not clear what the article wants to talk about! If the main subject is the illigal immigration, or the 'Ndrangheta, or the economy in Italy, or the racism... but despite the "excessive tolerance of illegal immigration" it seems that most of the workers were legal immigrants and not illegal!! What happen in Rosarno has underlined how bad Italy is managing the immigration: the Constitution says that Italy is a democratic Republic based on work and that every Italian citizens has the right to have a dignified life but I think this is a human right, so also not Italian citizens, living and working in Italy, should have a dignified life, and in Rosarno, but also in many other places, is not rispacted this simple principle.
First of all I don't stand up for non-EU citizens that come here in Italy without getting a job legally but it's not their fault because in the case of Rosarno we have to blame Italian employers who employed immigrants illegally. The major culprits are the local authority and the Province that didn't take part in this episode even if they knew what was happening. If they had operated somehow, maybe the damages and the consequences would have been less serious.
I don't think immigrants should live like that, the local authority (if there is one!) should take measures to give them a honest and regularly paid job so that they can lead a normal life.
In my opinion Roberto Maroni is wrong because he puts the blame on the Africans but, in this case, their reaction was absolutely understandable, they have lived in wretched dwellings like animals in their cages; everyone would have done the same thing reacting in that way.
Finally, the guys who injured two of the farmworkers were the last straw because that attack led to Africans' riots and to terrified inhabitants. Their aim should have been the Province and the local authority that knew the situation but pretended to see nothing.
Chronicles of announced tragedies. I don't know why in our country some dangerous situations become real only when their negative consequences are extremely visible. I don't understand why we usually face problems when it's already too late. And yet we tolerate every day the problems of a bad-managed massive immigration, hundreds of people that live in subhuman conditions, foreign and italian not legal workers, some local pseudo-economical systems based on the barren exploitation of men, lands and national or european resources. All these ones are normal things for our so-called "civil" country. But why it can't become a normal behavior to prevent social and economical problems instead of finding -at the end- the guilties, that often are traditionally invisible? About the article...I think that this article of the Economist is really a good example of "connotative" writing, very popular in the italian press but, as we can see, also in the british one! It uses many commonplaces that make our Italy the picturesque reign of illegality and intollerance and proves a biased use of the truth.
Some weeks ago I watched 'Annozero'. They were speaking about Rosarno's riots. They were asking if it is possible that nobody could foresee what happened in Rosarno. They have shown a clip of ten years ago. The clip has demonstrated that the problems of African workers have been existing since then and nothing has changed because nobody did nothing. The hypocrisies of politicians disgust me.
I agree with Giulia to blame the local authorities in Rosarno that know immigrants work conditions.They should have known that , with such economical problems especially in the south of Italy,riots between the local population and the immigrants would have been an obvious consequence.Local employers took advantages of subsidies from Europe and exploited the immigrants,supported by Mafia that is at the top of this business.Measures should be taken to reduce the flow of immigrants to Italy ,in order to guarantee them to work legally and not in the hands of people wanting to treat them like slaves. Its a pity that ,despite racism attitude in the leading party in Italy ,it hasn't pointed out the fact that many locals in Rosarno were sympathetic with immigrants ,they tried to help them ,offering food ;it's important not to make generalisations
Talking about this situation in Rosarno, to me it's quite hard to identify properly who to point as the guilty, and even to understand what the problem is. However listening to the tv programmes and reading the newspapers i have got clear that there were racial tensions between the local landowners and the immigrants.
The question is: what caused this tension? Has the immigrants somehow altered the economical situation over there? Maybe, but is not a secret that in the last years croppicker were underpaid immigrants, so we can say that they are helping the local business to remain competitive. Maybe we have to search elsewhere. Of course there were tensions between the immigrants, maybe lot of them were sick of being exploited and ill-treated. We can say this because the immigrants riot has been caused by the kneecap of one of them acted by a so-called "caporale".
So immigrant reacted with rage against the "caporalato", and the citizens reacted with rage to the violence of the immigrants.
If it is true, i don't think that this stuff is about racism, let's say this is about customs: immigrants don't know that in the Southern Italy citizens don't reacts against mafia, and they don't know that if you react to mafia no istitution is going to help you.
I always wondered how farmers can make good profit when customers buy fruit under 2 euro per kilo. The farmers complain about the high cost of work so they prefer to leave fruits on the trees instead of make too little profit. It seems that paying legal wages, taxes, transports etc. isn't worthwhile so they cut costs on the manpower. I think illegal immigrants shouldn't be allowed to stay in Italy because they don't have rights and so is hard to protect them. The government should fight the exploiters of immigrants workers but we should accept higher prices preferring Italian made food. The definition xenophobic for Northern League is inappropriate. There are members of the party like Borghezio who are xenophobic but it's not the line of the party. I agree with them when they ask for rules about immigration but it doesn't mean we don't need immigrants help for our economy. We just need legality.
I think it's not simple to deal with a problem that involves racial issues. Rosarno's facts aren’t simple at all, because they involve political and economic issues too. So, let's try to analyze this problem keeping in mind that: it's complex, there are many facets to take into account and there is not a unique guilty for what has happened (I state this beforehand because I found the great majority of the comments on The Economist too simplistic, focusing only on one or two aspects of the problem and pretending to hold "The Truth". Analysing the problem superficially there is the risk to end up in stereotypes and racism).
I don't claim to have the answer to the problem, but I think that some considerations are needed. First of all, most immigrants in Italy are legal, only a small percentage of them is composed of illegal ones. This is also true for Rosarno’s ones. Therefore Roberto Maroni, who ”blamed the violence on excessive tolerance of ILLEGAL immigration“, is completely wrong. “Immigrant" is not equivalent to “illegal immigrant". About Rosarno's crop-pickers, as the article points out they live in inhuman conditions, they are underpaid and continuously subject to harassment. Furthermore, in Italy there are not politics of integration at all, and immigrants are often treated like pariah.
Obviously, the violent reaction of the African immigrants in Rosarno is to blame, but it is equally to blame the reaction of the locals. It’s wrong and ineffective to answer violence with other violence; violence must be answered with legality (that is, by enforcing the law and sentencing the offenders).
I made these considerations to point out that it's too simple (and it’s wrong) to blame exclusively the immigrants for what happened. Their reaction is an effect which has multiple causes. Wouldn't it be more effective to work on those causes? For example, why the government does not take strong measures against the employers who exploit black-market labour? The Rosarno's facts are just the tip of the iceberg of a bigger problem that has deeper economic and politic roots. Local (and national) authorities knew very well the situation of immigrant crop-pickers in Southern Italy, the vexation they were subject to, and the issue of black-market labour: these are old problems, not brand-new ones. Why the authorities did not take any measure against them?
For all these reasons, putting the blame only on the Africans as Roberto Maroni did is a shortsighted analysis: it’s nothing but a populistic conclusion, trying only to find a scapegoat, but useless when trying to solve the problem. Moreover, Maroni should blame nobody but himself and his party for the bad management of illegal immigration, since Lega Nord was the main promoter of the Bossi-Fini law which was meant to solve the issue of illegal immigration.
Hello everybody! I want to explain briefly my opinion about the article, but above all I want to clarify my point of view about what’s happened in Rosarno. The Rosarno riots occurred some weeks ago, and now is the time to make the point about the causes that have led to this situation. First of all, I want to stress that in my opinion the Rosarno riots are only a signal that prefigures the crisis of the agriculture in the south of Italy, in particular the extensive agriculture of the plains. In fact I think that is impossible to explain what happened putting the blame on the widespread xenophobia in the southern Italy society or on the illegal activities of the ‘Ndrangheta in these places. On the one hand xenophobia and racism are diffused in the South as in the North of our country, and I don’t think that people who live in Reggio Calabria are more racist than people from Milan or Treviso! On the other hand I don’t understand why ‘Ndrangheta, the powerful calabrian mafia, would have had stir up troubles in her areas, drawing the attention of the reporters and of the Bench. In conclusion I think that we can find the fundamental causes of the riots in the social and economical structure of the small calabrian towns like Rosarno and for this reason I partially agree with the central analysis of the Economist. The social conflict among the profit of the small farmer-capitalist and the migrant people who reclaim work to survive is clearly exploded as a consequence of the crisis of the citrus fruit business. The conflict in Rosarno is above all a strife in which the workers reclaim work as a basic right and as a necessary condition to keep safe their life. We can observe the same strife among factory workers and industrial class for example in the case of the Fiat factories of Pomigliano d’Arco and Termini Imerese. The new element in this matter is the power showed by the migrant workers that have reclaimed their rights without the support of any trade union and in a society dominated by the hypocrisy, in which neither the public institutions nor the association have given their aid to improve the life conditions of black workers. I hope that the social consciousness of Italian people wakes up after these dramatic events and that for the 1 of March we can organize a day of solidarity and a great strike of all the black workers from the bottom up. This is the best way to apologize to the migrant people for what’s happened in Rosarno and to help all the workers that are fighting for the improvement of their social condition.
Hi everyone, I think that what happened in Rosarno is like the last straw of the crisis concerning the whole domain of agriculture in Southern Italy which has begun a long time ago. The necessity to face the competition of other countries in the same field of market has led to a real labor exploitation against the migrant African people and managed by the local criminal organization. Their work condition is unacceptable and the facts happened a few days ago represent a foregone conclusion. I hope these events can lead to a change regarding a better regulation of migrant workers' condition in the name of the respect of Human dignity. About the comments to the article, I have a great surprise to see how people is aware of racism, making mention of their country's experience in this matter. Racism is everywhere and it seems like an everyday event which can't be removed as part of a 'civilized' society. This scares me.
In my personal opinion, the events occurred in Rosarno, are an evolution of an historical problem linked to the presence of organized crime present in southern Region of Italy: conspiracy of silence. At an institutional level, the main problem isn't racism, which I consider only a consequence, but the total lack of any action by local government: it is impossible that anyone among local politics, judges and law enforcement didn't know about what was happening: there were hundreds of these illegal workers, not a few number. The intervention of Interior Minister Roberto Maroni is completely wrong, since, as every time, it tries to contrast only the consequence, not the causes of the problem.
I have been working in tertiary education and foreign language teaching for over 16 years. My professional areas of interest are Language Awareness, Tandem learning, Learner Counselling, Cross Cultural communication and language learning in multimedia environnments including Second Life.
Hello,everybody!
ReplyDeleteI'm Roxana from B2 course and I'd like to write my opinion about the article.
First of all,I didn't understand if it is about race riots or the mafia or the immigration.However,inquiry shows that 'NDRANGHETA seems not to be involved in the Rosarno case.The Calabrian mafia is now considered Italy's strongest and most impenetrable ,they use less traumatic and less noisy methods ,because they don't want even more police in the area .
Rosarno is a citrus -growing area and is experiencing its own economic crisis.The sudden unemployment of hundreds of this illegals is what provoked the riot.The economic crisis lead to racial tensions ,there are no jobs for locals ,those ,white youths'.People think that Africans are stealing jobs from Italians, as British people think Italians are stealing their jobs ,because they work at a wage lower than British people,but it's also true that this kind of job,as many others,is a job that many Italians see as beneath them .
Hundred of immigrants live in what human rights groups describe as subhuman conditions .They are often paid less than E30 a day for picking fruit .But nobody forced them to come .Unfortunatelly,many Italian economic realities are based on the exploatation of low-cost foreign labor.
Hi!
ReplyDeleteI agree with Roxana especially with the comment about the cause of the riot.
It's not clear what the article wants to talk about! If the main subject is the illigal immigration, or the 'Ndrangheta, or the economy in Italy, or the racism... but despite the "excessive tolerance of illegal immigration" it seems that most of the workers were legal immigrants and not illegal!!
What happen in Rosarno has underlined how bad Italy is managing the immigration: the Constitution says that Italy is a democratic Republic based on work and that every Italian citizens has the right to have a dignified life but I think this is a human right, so also not Italian citizens, living and working in Italy, should have a dignified life, and in Rosarno, but also in many other places, is not rispacted this simple principle.
First of all I don't stand up for non-EU citizens that come here in Italy without getting a job legally but it's not their fault because in the case of Rosarno we have to blame Italian employers who employed immigrants illegally. The major culprits are the local authority and the Province that didn't take part in this episode even if they knew what was happening. If they had operated somehow, maybe the damages and the consequences would have been less serious.
ReplyDeleteI don't think immigrants should live like that, the local authority (if there is one!) should take measures to give them a honest and regularly paid job so that they can lead a normal life.
In my opinion Roberto Maroni is wrong because he puts the blame on the Africans but, in this case, their reaction was absolutely understandable, they have lived in wretched dwellings like animals in their cages; everyone would have done the same thing reacting in that way.
Finally, the guys who injured two of the farmworkers were the last straw because that attack led to Africans' riots and to terrified inhabitants. Their aim should have been the Province and the local authority that knew the situation but pretended to see nothing.
Chronicles of announced tragedies.
ReplyDeleteI don't know why in our country some dangerous situations become real only when their negative consequences are extremely visible. I don't understand why we usually face problems when it's already too late. And yet we tolerate every day the problems of a bad-managed massive immigration, hundreds of people that live in subhuman conditions, foreign and italian not legal workers, some local pseudo-economical systems based on the barren exploitation of men, lands and national or european resources. All these ones are normal things for our so-called "civil" country. But why it can't become a normal behavior to prevent social and economical problems instead of finding -at the end- the guilties, that often are traditionally invisible?
About the article...I think that this article of the Economist is really a good example of "connotative" writing, very popular in the italian press but, as we can see, also in the british one! It uses many commonplaces that make our Italy the picturesque reign of illegality and intollerance and proves a biased use of the truth.
Some weeks ago I watched 'Annozero'. They were speaking about Rosarno's riots. They were asking if it is possible that nobody could foresee what happened in Rosarno. They have shown a clip of ten years ago. The clip has demonstrated that the problems of African workers have been existing since then and nothing has changed because nobody did nothing. The hypocrisies of politicians disgust me.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Giulia to blame the local authorities in Rosarno that know immigrants work conditions.They should have known that , with such economical problems especially in the south of Italy,riots between the local population and the immigrants would have been an obvious consequence.Local employers took advantages of subsidies from Europe and exploited the immigrants,supported by Mafia that is at the top of this business.Measures should be taken to reduce the flow of immigrants to Italy ,in order to guarantee them to work legally and not in the hands of people wanting to treat them like slaves.
ReplyDeleteIts a pity that ,despite racism attitude in the leading party in Italy ,it hasn't pointed out the fact that many locals in Rosarno were sympathetic with immigrants ,they tried to help them ,offering food ;it's important not to make generalisations
Talking about this situation in Rosarno, to me it's quite hard to identify properly who to point as the guilty, and even to understand what the problem is.
ReplyDeleteHowever listening to the tv programmes and reading the newspapers i have got clear that there were racial tensions between the local landowners and the immigrants.
The question is: what caused this tension?
Has the immigrants somehow altered the economical situation over there? Maybe, but is not a secret that in the last years croppicker were underpaid immigrants, so we can say that they are helping the local business to remain competitive.
Maybe we have to search elsewhere. Of course there were tensions between the immigrants, maybe lot of them were sick of being exploited and ill-treated.
We can say this because the immigrants riot has been caused by the kneecap of one of them acted by a so-called "caporale".
So immigrant reacted with rage against the "caporalato", and the citizens reacted with rage to the violence of the immigrants.
If it is true, i don't think that this stuff is about racism, let's say this is about customs: immigrants don't know that in the Southern Italy citizens don't reacts against mafia, and they don't know that if you react to mafia no istitution is going to help you.
I always wondered how farmers can make good profit when customers buy fruit under 2 euro per kilo. The farmers complain about the high cost of work so they prefer to leave fruits on the trees instead of make too little profit. It seems that paying legal wages, taxes, transports etc. isn't worthwhile so they cut costs on the manpower. I think illegal immigrants shouldn't be allowed to stay in Italy because they don't have rights and so is hard to protect them. The government should fight the exploiters of immigrants workers but we should accept higher prices preferring Italian made food.
ReplyDeleteThe definition xenophobic for Northern League is inappropriate. There are members of the party like Borghezio who are xenophobic but it's not the line of the party. I agree with them when they ask for rules about immigration but it doesn't mean we don't need immigrants help for our economy. We just need legality.
I think it's not simple to deal with a problem that involves racial issues. Rosarno's facts aren’t simple at all, because they involve political and economic issues too. So, let's try to analyze this problem keeping in mind that: it's complex, there are many facets to take into account and there is not a unique guilty for what has happened (I state this beforehand because I found the great majority of the comments on The Economist too simplistic, focusing only on one or two aspects of the problem and pretending to hold "The Truth". Analysing the problem superficially there is the risk to end up in stereotypes and racism).
ReplyDeleteI don't claim to have the answer to the problem, but I think that some considerations are needed.
First of all, most immigrants in Italy are legal, only a small percentage of them is composed of illegal ones. This is also true for Rosarno’s ones. Therefore Roberto Maroni, who ”blamed the violence on excessive tolerance of ILLEGAL immigration“, is completely wrong. “Immigrant" is not equivalent to “illegal immigrant".
About Rosarno's crop-pickers, as the article points out they live in inhuman conditions, they are underpaid and continuously subject to harassment.
Furthermore, in Italy there are not politics of integration at all, and immigrants are often treated like pariah.
Obviously, the violent reaction of the African immigrants in Rosarno is to blame, but it is equally to blame the reaction of the locals. It’s wrong and ineffective to answer violence with other violence; violence must be answered with legality (that is, by enforcing the law and sentencing the offenders).
I made these considerations to point out that it's too simple (and it’s wrong) to blame exclusively the immigrants for what happened. Their reaction is an effect which has multiple causes. Wouldn't it be more effective to work on those causes? For example, why the government does not take strong measures against the employers who exploit black-market labour? The Rosarno's facts are just the tip of the iceberg of a bigger problem that has deeper economic and politic roots. Local (and national) authorities knew very well the situation of immigrant crop-pickers in Southern Italy, the vexation they were subject to, and the issue of black-market labour: these are old problems, not brand-new ones. Why the authorities did not take any measure against them?
For all these reasons, putting the blame only on the Africans as Roberto Maroni did is a shortsighted analysis: it’s nothing but a populistic conclusion, trying only to find a scapegoat, but useless when trying to solve the problem. Moreover, Maroni should blame nobody but himself and his party for the bad management of illegal immigration, since Lega Nord was the main promoter of the Bossi-Fini law which was meant to solve the issue of illegal immigration.
Rob
Hello everybody!
ReplyDeleteI want to explain briefly my opinion about the article, but above all I want to clarify my point of view about what’s happened in Rosarno.
The Rosarno riots occurred some weeks ago, and now is the time to make the point about the causes that have led to this situation.
First of all, I want to stress that in my opinion the Rosarno riots are only a signal that prefigures the crisis of the agriculture in the south of Italy, in particular the extensive agriculture of the plains.
In fact I think that is impossible to explain what happened putting the blame on the widespread xenophobia in the southern Italy society or on the illegal activities of the ‘Ndrangheta in these places.
On the one hand xenophobia and racism are diffused in the South as in the North of our country, and I don’t think that people who live in Reggio Calabria are more racist than people from Milan or Treviso! On the other hand I don’t understand why ‘Ndrangheta, the powerful calabrian mafia, would have had stir up troubles in her areas, drawing the attention of the reporters and of the Bench.
In conclusion I think that we can find the fundamental causes of the riots in the social and economical structure of the small calabrian towns like Rosarno and for this reason I partially agree with the central analysis of the Economist.
The social conflict among the profit of the small farmer-capitalist and the migrant people who reclaim work to survive is clearly exploded as a consequence of the crisis of the citrus fruit business. The conflict in Rosarno is above all a strife in which the workers reclaim work as a basic right and as a necessary condition to keep safe their life. We can observe the same strife among factory workers and industrial class for example in the case of the Fiat factories of Pomigliano d’Arco and Termini Imerese.
The new element in this matter is the power showed by the migrant workers that have reclaimed their rights without the support of any trade union and in a society dominated by the hypocrisy, in which neither the public institutions nor the association have given their aid to improve the life conditions of black workers.
I hope that the social consciousness of Italian people wakes up after these dramatic events and that for the 1 of March we can organize a day of solidarity and a great strike of all the black workers from the bottom up. This is the best way to apologize to the migrant people for what’s happened in Rosarno and to help all the workers that are fighting for the improvement of their social condition.
Hi everyone,
ReplyDeleteI think that what happened in Rosarno is like the last straw of the crisis concerning the whole domain of agriculture in Southern Italy which has begun a long time ago. The necessity to face the competition of other countries in the same field of market has led to a real labor exploitation against the migrant African people and managed by the local criminal organization.
Their work condition is unacceptable and the facts happened a few days ago represent a foregone conclusion. I hope these events can lead to a change regarding a better regulation of migrant workers' condition in the name of the respect of Human dignity.
About the comments to the article, I have a great surprise to see how people is aware of racism, making mention of their country's experience in this matter. Racism is everywhere and it seems like an everyday event which can't be removed as part of a 'civilized' society.
This scares me.
In my personal opinion, the events occurred in Rosarno, are an evolution of an historical problem linked to the presence of organized crime present in southern Region of Italy: conspiracy of silence.
ReplyDeleteAt an institutional level, the main problem isn't racism, which I consider only a consequence, but the total lack of any action by local government: it is impossible that anyone among local politics, judges and law enforcement didn't know about what was happening: there were hundreds of these illegal workers, not a few number.
The intervention of Interior Minister Roberto Maroni is completely wrong, since, as every time, it tries to contrast only the consequence, not the causes of the problem.