Thread: Immigrants riot in Italy amid racial unrest

Racial violence continues in Italy as four migrant workers wounded in shootings

• Southern town of Rosarno suffers night of violence
• Farm workers protest against racist treatment

* John Hooper in Rome
* The Guardian, Saturday 9 January 2010

Two migrant workers from Africa were shot and two more beaten with iron bars last night as racial unrest continued to grip the town of Rosarno in the south of Italy, after a night of rioting and an earlier shooting in which a further two immigrants were wounded.

On a main road, close to a disused building in which hundreds of itinerant farm workers live in conditions of squalor, about 100 local people armed with iron bars and wooden staves were manning an illegal roadblock.

The latest shooting took place at the same location as the earlier attack – an unoccupied factory on the outskirts of the town that also serves as sleeping quarters for workers from all over Africa. As in the previous attack, a drive-by shooting, the victims were hit and injured with pellets from an air rifle or pistol.

Following the first incident, more than 100 immigrants rampaged through the town on Thursday night, smashing car windows with steels bars, setting rubbish bins and cars on fire, and clashing with police in riot gear.

Some 2,000 immigrants demonstrated in front of the town hall yesterday to protest at what they said was racist treatment by locals. Some shouted "We are not animals" and carried signs reading "Italians here are racist".

As the demonstrators marched through Rosarno to the town hall, a resident fired shots into the air from his balcony, allegedly to protect his wife and child, who he said had had stones thrown at them by protesters.

By nightfall, after further demonstrations by immigrants and locals, seven people had been arrested and 37 injured.

Several clashes were reported between locals and immigrant farm workers, most of whom come from sub-Saharan Africa or the Maghreb. Furious about the violence and damage, groups of locals occupied the town hall and blocked a main road.

Silvio Berlusconi's interior minister, Roberto Maroni, provoked controversy by appearing to blame earlier governments for the outburst of violence. He said: "For all these years clandestine immigration has been tolerated, which feeds crime."

But others pointed a finger at the farm workers' conditions. Father Carmelo Ascone, the parish priest of Rosarno, said they reminded him of the circles of hell in Dante's Divine Comedy. "These people live in inhuman and desperate conditions," he said.

Several thousand immigrants live in and around Rosarno while helping with the harvest of oranges and clementines.

Looming behind the disturbances is Calabria's mafia, the 'Ndrangheta. Rosarno, a town of 14,000 inhabitants, is a stronghold of the organisation, which police and prosecutors say has overtaken Cosa Nostra in Sicily to become Italy's most potent crime syndicate. In December 2008, the town council was dissolved on orders from the head of state because it had been infiltrated by mobsters and their known associates. Rosarno is currently administered by a prefect appointed by the central government.

The prefect, Domenico Bagnato, said yesterday: "The situation is serious and onerous. I have spoken to the immigrants and I have told them that we shall do everything possible to protect them. But I have also made it clear that they ought not to confuse an attack by individuals with the attitude of the entire town."

Just over a year ago, at the time of the last citrus harvest, an unknown gunman walked into a factory where several hundred farm workers were sleeping and shot two of them. One, a 21-year-old from the Ivory Coast, was seriously injured.

The latest riot began as a protest against the insecure conditions in which the immigrants find themselves. But a former town councillor, Domenico Ventre, said: "The immigrants in Rosarno are helped and assisted. Their reaction to the isolated incident on Thursday was disproportionate. We cannot allow them to devastate our town, spreading fear among the inhabitants."

In their report of arrests, the Carabinieri said that one man had been held for trying to run over a farm worker with an earth mover. Another had allegedly attempted to run down an immigrant with his car.

A smaller riot by immigrants broke out near Naples in September 2008 after a multiple killing that was linked to organised crime.

According to the Catholic charity Caritas, immigrants now account for 7.2% of the resident population in Italy – one percentage point more than the EU average. Caritas put the number of legal immigrants at 4.5 million and said the number of illegal immigrants had fallen sharply, to 422,000.

Berlusconi's government has taken a hard line against illegal immigration and made an agreement with Libya to prevent boatloads of immigrants landing on its southern shores from Africa. The boats are now routinely intercepted in international waters and returned to Libya.
Grapes of wrath
Desperation of itinerant workers

The disturbances in Calabria have brought home the fact that the wretched migrants who arrive from Africa off Italy's coastline do not disappear once they are taken ashore. Thousands end up in a transient workforce of crop-pickers that finds work in the south.

Some of the Africans who rebelled after the shooting in Rosarno will have been helping with the wine harvest in Sicily in the early autumn or picking olives in Puglia in the late autumn. Some will be intending to drift up to Campania, around Naples, next spring.

On the Gioia Tauro plain which encompasses Rosarno, they are collected each morning by overseers and driven into citrus groves for work that can last from dawn to dusk.

"They earn €25 a day", said Father Ennio Stamile of the Roman Catholic charity Caritas. "They have to send money to their countries to maintain their families and also live here. Not much is left for them. The economic crisis has exacerbated their situation."

"On the plain, there are about 2,000 African immigrants who sleep the night crowded together in a former paper mill and another large building, said Monsignor Pino de Masi, the vicar-general of the Oppido-Palmi diocese. "If anyone from central government were to see the conditions in which they live, without sanitation, electricity, water or heating, they would not be surprised by what has happened."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/ja ... ns-wounded

Originally Posted by tomsarge

QUESTION: What is the primary religion of the illegal immigrants flooding in Italy? I noticed that the only country mentioned was Moroco. Isn't that primarily a Muslim country? If so, Italy's problems may be bigger than they realize.

Christopher Caldwell in his book, Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West gives numerous accounts of Europeans being fed up with legal and illegal immigration.

I'm not suprised by the violence at all; just like the U.S. the politicians go against the will of the people. Google The Daily Mail or Guardian UK and put "immigration" in the search field. There are countless articles about immigrants not assimilating. The EU reporters, like U.S. reporters, are heavely slanted in favor of amnesty, open borders ect.. but the topix type messages left by readers show they are p.o.ed.

Originally Posted by Bowman

Originally Posted by tncdel

Note the significant error in choice of words, calling them "immigrants." They are NOT immigrants. But are illegal alien INVADERS. If you concede them the status of immigrants, that effectively wrongfully lumps them in with those foreigners who went to the time and trouble of complying with the law. If you call them immigrants, then so too were the Nazis who invaded France in WW II. It needn't be a military operation to be an INVADER.

You could say the press has helped to cause these riots also, by pushing these unwanted foreign criminals on the native population by calling them "immigrants".

Ditto Bowman! Our media also has a penchant for pushing these unwanted foreign invaders on the native population by referring to them as immigrants. The United States has been able thus far to avoid the violence and so often associated with these foreign invaders. Much of Europe has not and it's only getting worse. But sooner or later, something must give....

Refusal by governments to enforce their laws creates a culture of corruption that spreads to other areas of a culture and society. What is happening in Italy and France is happening in the cities of the USA. US Citizens are fed up with their governments refusal to secure the border with Mexico and their refusal to enforce immigration laws. Black Americans are being replaced in many job markets by illegals and black neighborhoods are being taken over by Mexicans and Central Americans. The racism that is resulting on the part of Mexicans towards blacks and vice versa is ready to explode. The US can only take so many years of unbridled and unfettered invasion from Mexico before it takes on in large part the worst the culture of Mexico has to offer. A country that will not enforce its own just laws is a country in serious decline and that appropriately described the US.

Originally Posted by PBHayes

Refusal by governments to enforce their laws creates a culture of corruption that spreads to other areas of a culture and society. What is happening in Italy and France is happening in the cities of the USA. US Citizens are fed up with their governments refusal to secure the border with Mexico and their refusal to enforce immigration laws. Black Americans are being replaced in many job markets by illegals and black neighborhoods are being taken over by Mexicans and Central Americans. The racism that is resulting on the part of Mexicans towards blacks and vice versa is ready to explode. The US can only take so many years of unbridled and unfettered invasion from Mexico before it takes on in large part the worst the culture of Mexico has to offer. A country that will not enforce its own just laws is a country in serious decline and that appropriately described the US.

I agree, basically you are saying since the government (and media) has supported anarchy and racism, in return they will be getting lots more anarchy and racism from the Citizens they have abused. It's sad actually.

This is just another example of what can, and will happen here, if Americans sit and wait for "someone" to do something. That someone needs to be ALL Americans to step up and make the government do their job.

"If anyone from central government were to see the conditions in which they live, without sanitation, electricity, water or heating, they would not be surprised by what has happened."

Just as with the justification of the illegal aliens who camp out in the valleys around LA. NO ONE told them to come here illegally and live this way, NO ONE. The Italians did not tell the illegals in THEIR country to come there, take jobs and then live like this. When they came illegally, they made themselves vulnerable to criminals and criminal employers who are exploiting them. The employer is wrong, but so is the illegal alien.

Italians evacuate migrants, bring in police after clashes

By Anne-Sophie Legge (AFP) – 8 hours ago

ROSARNO, Italy — More than 900 immigrants fled a southern Italian town on Saturday after residents violently attacked African farm workers.

The clashes which began late Thursday left 67 people injured in the Calabrian town of Rosarno, but calm was generally restored Saturday, with barricades erected by locals dismantled and shops open.

The injured included 31 foreigners, the latest of whom was fired at with a shotgun on Saturday, as well as 19 police officers and 17 locals, police said.

Locals applauded as buses with police escorts left, taking immigrants from Rosarno to the towns of Crotone, 170 kilometres (105 miles) away, and Bari, around 400 kilometres (260 kilometers) to the northeast.

"Around 910 foreigners have been evacuated to Crotone and Bari," local police chief Mario Morcone told AFP.

A further 210 immigrants were expected to depart during the evening and night, taking the total to leave the area past 1,100, Morcone said, adding that the situation in Rosarno was slowly returning to normal.

The Italian authorities have said immigrants taking the special buses will not be arrested, even if they arrived in the country illegally.

Some of the immigrants who came to the region in their thousands to work on the fruit harvest are fleeing despite being owed wages by their employers.

Francis, a 25-year-old from Ghana, said he was owed 200 euros (290 dollars) but was too frightened to stay. "If we don't leave, we will die," he said, "We came here to work and now people are shooting at us."

The violence broke out Thursday when hundreds of immigrants, most of them Africans employed illegally, demonstrated after some of them had been shot at with air rifles, according to Italian news agency ANSA.

Demonstrators set fire to cars and smashed windscreens before police intervened, leading to a scuffle that left several of the demonstrators injured.

On Friday, local residents set up roadblocks and occupied the town hall, before violence erupted once more.

In separate incidents on Friday, two immigrants were beaten and seriously wounded with iron bars, media and officials said. One of the wounded was admitted to hospital for brain surgery.

Two other immigrants were hit in the legs with shotgun pellets and five more were deliberately run over by vehicles driven by locals, they said. They suffered minor injuries.

Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, a member of the anti-immigrant Northern League party, said the tensions were a result of "too much tolerance towards clandestine immigration".

The right-wing newspaper Il Giornale, owned by the family of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, agreed that illegal immigrants should be kept out.

The majority of workers in Rosarno lived in a disused factory just outside the town of 15,000 inhabitants, with just eight chemical toilets and three showers for 1,000 people.

Compared to other immigrants camping out in freezing conditions in old farm buildings, those living among the factory's old machines and pipes were the lucky ones.

According to Italy's main trade union CGIL, about 50,000 immigrant workers in Italy live in poor conditions similar to those in Rosarno, being housed in insalubrious huts without running water.

It said immigrants employed as farm labourers earned low wages of around 25 euro (36 dollars) a day.

One employer, Pasquale Giovinazzo, 60, justified the low wages, saying the African workers were less experienced than Italians.

The union also accused the mafia of controlling the sector and criticised Maroni's statement, saying immigrants were paid "miserable salaries and have terrible hours, similar to slavery".

www.google.com

President Giorgio Napolitano called for an immediate end to the unrest, during which at least 37 people, including 18 policemen, have been injured.

So why wasn't the law being enforced before NOW! Finger pointing YES! So we have to compete with the global world for jobs.... Shut down immigration for FIVE YEARS!

Why isn't the overstays on visas and undocumented aliens hunted down by the Federal Marshals, Bounty Hunters, and police of all sorts?

E-Verify, Save, enforcement and communication between agencies such as IRS, ICE, FBI, courts, police, and etc....

CENSUS is counting ILLEGALS for representation!

I don't see this as a racist issue, I see it as a cultural issue...here we have a race of people who thrive on the belief that they are going to turn America into a Spanish speaking country by 2050, they throw it in our face that the European culture will be the minority by 2050, they want to take over our political system ( I am not speaking of all Latino's, but a great majority of them), which is happening at the local and state level everyday, they do what they feel is good for the Latino's agenda and not what is best for America and all Americans, we see this on a daily basis...Then we have Muslims (again not all) as does so many countries in Europe especially Britain who want Sharia law, we all know what that means.

It is only a matter of time before riots break out when these countries see their culture and their country making these radical changes, our cultural differences are huge.


not to mention people are not assimilating, they are living in enclaves and growing by leaps and bounds.

We give away citizenship to people who could care less about the country as a whole and still remain loyal to their home country....

It is only a matter of time and they are being aided and abetted by our government, all in the name of globalization and the almighty $$$$$.

Originally Posted by PBHayes

Refusal by governments to enforce their laws creates a culture of corruption that spreads to other areas of a culture and society. What is happening in Italy and France is happening in the cities of the USA. US Citizens are fed up with their governments refusal to secure the border with Mexico and their refusal to enforce immigration laws. Black Americans are being replaced in many job markets by illegals and black neighborhoods are being taken over by Mexicans and Central Americans. The racism that is resulting on the part of Mexicans towards blacks and vice versa is ready to explode. The US can only take so many years of unbridled and unfettered invasion from Mexico before it takes on in large part the worst the culture of Mexico has to offer. A country that will not enforce its own just laws is a country in serious decline and that appropriately described the US.

Ditto PBHayes! You're absolutely right!