Thread: Immigrants riot in Italy amid racial unrest

They can put all the PC and Racism spin they want on this, fact is Italians don't want they culture diluted by Multi-Culturalism. They see whats going on in Englandstan and the United States and they don't want it.

Pope denounces Italy immigrant clashes

By NICOLE WINFIELD
The Associated Press
Sunday, January 10, 2010; 12:47 PM



VATICAN CITY -- Pope Benedict XVI denounced the riots last week between immigrants and Italians in southern Italy, saying Sunday that migrants have rights, must be respected, and are equally loved by God.

Benedict made the unusual commentary on current events during his weekly noon blessing, clearly coming down on the side of the migrants in exhorting Italians to see them as human beings and not just labor to be exploited.

"I invite everyone to look in the face of the other and discover that there is a soul, a history, a life, a person whom God loves as he loves me," Benedict said.

The riots by hundreds of African migrant workers erupted Thursday night in Rosarno, a town in the underdeveloped agricultural region of Calabria, after two migrants were wounded in a shooting. Dozens were injured in the two days of clashes, which officials say may have been provoked by the region's powerful organized crime group - the 'ndrangheta.

The violence underscored the simmering tensions between immigrants and Italians, many of whom resent the foreigners yet rely on their labor to do the agricultural, domestic or factory work that many Italians refuse to do.

"Every migrant is a human being - different because of provenance, culture and tradition - but a person to be respected and having rights, particularly in work, where the temptation to exploit is easy," Benedict said.

Interior Minister Roberto Maroni concurred Sunday with the hypothesis that the 'ndrangheta may have provoked the riots, either in reaction to anti-mob crackdown efforts or to show the mafia's strength in the region.

Earlier this month, a bomb exploded in front of the regional courthouse in what was seen as the 'ndrangheta response to the recent arrests of major bosses and efforts to shore up Calabrian law enforcement.

Newspaper analysts have suggested that Rosarno residents, who have long lived peacefully with the seasonal migrants, turned to their local 'ndrangheta bosses when the migrants' numbers increased yet field work dried up.

"It's one of the possible (hypotheses), the investigations are under way," Maroni told Sky TG24.

The U.N. refugee agency has said many of Rosarno's migrants came recently from Italy's north after factory jobs dried up last year because of the economic crisis. That influx added to the town's existing migrant population.

Maroni faulted local authorities for not having intervened sooner, particularly considering the wretched conditions in which the migrants were living in an abandoned cheese factory. He also blamed local businessmen for paying migrants low wages under the table.

According to Italian law, migrants must have a job lined up before stepping foot on Italian soil.

Premier Silvio Berlusconi's conservative government has taken a hard line on illegal migration, sending back migrants found at sea even before screening them for possible asylum and repatriating those who reach Italy if they don't have a job or fail to qualify for asylum.

Maroni, a leading member of the anti-immigrant Northern League party and the enforcer of the get-tough strategy, said Italy had forcibly repatriated 40,000 people in the last two years, and that the numbers of foreigners trying to reach Italy had fallen as a result. In 2008, 30,000 illegal migrants arrived in Italy; in 2009 only 3,000, he said.

In the wake of the Rosarno riots, several hundred of the town's migrants were bused out of the region to shelters in other parts of Italy. Maroni said those who didn't have valid work documents or asylum applications would be expelled.

The pope said immigrants to Italy were looking for a better life in a country that needs them, yet he also denounced the recourse to riot, saying: "Violence must never, for anyone, be the way to resolve differences."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... c-religion

We need to live by wisdom that is centuries old.

QUOTE: Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Source: The Declaration of Independence

Our representatives should read this every morning and fear the people, unfortunately the people seem to be sleeping yet. I for one don’t feel safe, and am definitely not happy about the millions of invaders we have in our homeland.

Originally Posted by ALIbacker

We need to live by wisdom that is centuries old.

QUOTE: Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Source: The Declaration of Independence

Our representatives should read this every morning and fear the people, unfortunately the people seem to be sleeping yet. I for one don’t feel safe, and am definitely not happy about the millions of invaders we have in our homeland.

Welcome ALIbacker! Excellent post!

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Italy must curb xenophobic attitudes towards migrant workers – UN rights experts

Refugees and migrants risk their lives travelling from Africa to Europe
12 January 2010 – In the wake of last week’s unrest in southern Italy, two United Nations independent human rights experts today called on the European nation’s Government to rein in the rising xenophobic attitudes towards migrant workers.
Dozens of people were injured in the three days of clashes that rocked the city of Rosarno. Some 1,000 migrants, most of whom are reportedly from Africa, were moved to migration centres, with authorities moving to deport many of them.

“Violence, be it perpetrated by Italians or migrant workers, must be addressed in the most vigorous manner through the rule of law and human rights should always be protected, regardless of immigration laws,â€

Italy must curb xenophobic attitudes towards migrant workers – UN rights experts

I heartily disagree. Migrant workers need to learn how to integrate and get along in a new country. The country should not have to bow to them.

Problems like this happen when the new kid in school starts demanding special treatment right off the bat and expects everyone to cater to him. The kids who've been there a long time start resenting the new kid. Voila, fights on.

Miguelina, you have hit it on the head. Personally, here in our country, I am tired of us giving special treatment and concessions to foreigners who come here and expect it, and further more to those here illegally.

A woman my teen son works with, lives in a part of town where there is a lot of Somalian Islamic immigrants and their kids (upwards to teens) routinely harass her and her daughter about wearing shorts in summer and not having their heads covered. They will stand in the nearby park and holler over to them how they are going to "hell-fire" for not covering their heads. As well some of the men were in the park and started harrasing her teen son with some of his friends, when they approached him and started shoving them, he fought back, and police did nothing about these men assaulting the under 18 small group of teens.

African Immigrants in Italy: Slave Labor for the Mafia
By Nina Burleigh / Rome Friday, Jan. 15, 2010

Riot policemen clash with protesters during a demonstration by members of antiracism associations in solidarity with the immigrant workers of Rosarno, Italy

Xenophobes in homogenous European countries often complain that immigrants will erase their most precious cultural norms. The race riots in southern Italy last weekend may be one indicator that change is inevitable, as African immigrants who don't live by the country's infamous omertÃ* code of silence violently protested against the powerful Mafia clans that control their lives, says Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah, an anti-Mob book that earned him both critical praise and a 24-hour police guard. Saviano — who reported from within the Camorra, Italy's biggest Mafia clan with a global reach into fashion, real estate, waste disposal and drugs — says the rioters are among the hundreds of thousands of immigrants caught up in a brutal cheap-labor system the Mafia runs for legitimate businesses from Milan to Naples.

The riots in Rosarno, which reportedly began after three Italian teenagers fired air rifles at two African immigrants, unsettled a nation that prides itself on its bella figura — the beautiful image. About 2,500 migrants live in the Rosarno valley in the southern Calabria region, moving with the seasonal agricultural jobs. Many have political asylum or are otherwise legally in Italy, but legal or not, the migrants are managed by a Mafia-run employment system, the caporalato, that operates like a 21st century chain gang. Saviano says that those who object to low wages or poor working conditions are simply eliminated — and not just by a pink slip. "It's a military system," Saviano tells TIME in Rome as one of the plainclothes cops guarding him stands nearby. "The farm and factory owners employ the Mafia caporali to bring the workers. The immigrants wait on the roads, the caporali pick them up and take them to the work. If they complain, they get killed."

The immigrants arrive in Italy from impoverished African or Eastern European countries and find themselves trapped in a system in which they work 10- to 14-hour days for about $3 an hour. They live in tents or shacks pitched inside abandoned buildings, without appliances, plumbing or health care. Italian society supports the system by keeping the immigrants on its margins. Services are few and far between, mainly provided by religious organizations. Non-Italian police are rarely seen, and only one nonwhite serves in Parliament. Many immigrants simply do not report crimes against them. Disappearances are frequent — the Polish government is still looking for more than 100 Polish migrants who vanished from the tomato farms of Puglia in 2006, some of whom are believed to have been killed.

Ironically, though, southern Italy's crime clans seem like a welcome wagon for the immigrants at the beginning, providing a deceptively accepting community for newcomers. "For the Mafia to keep them as low-priced labor, they create this atmosphere of tolerance," Saviano says. "They actually live better down there than in Milan. They are treated and paid like slaves, but the human relationships are warmer than those you would find in Milan. Africans say the Italian girls look them in the eyes in Calabria, while in the north they wouldn't."
(See pictures of migrants being forced out in France.)


Still, as the Rosarno riots illustrate, the immigrants are far from accepted by most Italians. Shootings like the ones that sparked the unrest are not uncommon. "We used to learn how to use our guns down there by shooting at dogs," says Saviano, who was brought up in the Naples area. "Now the 14-year-olds shoot at immigrants. It can look like kids fooling around, but it's not; it's target practice." The town's African population responded by burning cars and smashing shop windows, prompting retaliatory attacks by white residents. It was the fourth outbreak of violence in the region in recent years. Six Africans died two years ago in fighting in the coastal town of Castel Volturno.
(Read "In Italy, Racial Tensions Explode into Violence.")


While the shootings were the apparent spark of the riots, the global economic downturn was a more distant cause. With budgets tightening, the E.U. cut its aid to southern Italian farmers, reducing the need for manual labor. "The Mafia wants to earn the same profits, and the workers are becoming a burden," Saviano says. Authorities have also turned a blind eye to their problems. Rather than increase social services or workplace regulations, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's administration has taken an increasingly popular anti-immigrant stance. About 1,000 of the African migrants in Rosarno were carted off to detention centers after the violence — some at their own request, the government says. Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, a member of the anti-immigrant Northern League party, said that "too much tolerance" had caused the unrest.

Saviano disagrees. "It's obvious they have let the Mafia freely do with the immigrants as they wish," he says. "When they undergo injustice, the immigrants have enormous difficulties speaking up about it, even when they have been abused by their own community." He adds, however, that this may be starting to change. "They are not like Italian workers, who will just leave if they don't like it. They protest because these jobs are the best situation they can have," he says. "As a southern Italian, I would tell these people, 'Stay. Please don't leave us alone with the Mafia.'"

— With reporting by Giulia Alagna



http://www.time.com/time/world/article/ ... Stories%29