ROME — Bloody clashes between African migrants and residents in one of Italy’s poorest regions over the past few days brought home a national dilemma Saturday: Many Italians don’t want to pick crops in the south or toil in the north’s factories, but they resent the desperate foreigners who will work for a pittance.
Premier Silvio Berlusconi last year dismissed any notion of a “multi-ethnic Italy.” His conservative coalition, which includes the anti-immigrant Northern League party, has cracked down on illegal immigration.
With surveys showing that many Italians blame immigrants for crime, tensions persist between citizens and foreigners. Sometimes those tensions erupt into violence, as they did these past days in Rosarno, a town in Calabria, an underdeveloped agricultural region with chronic unemployment.
At least 38 people were wounded in the violence, which began Thursday night when two migrants were shot with a pellet gun in an attack the migrants blamed on racism. Violence continued Friday with clashes involving Africans, Rosarno residents and police.
By Saturday, the violence had largely subsided, except for a pellet-gun shooting that wounded a migrant, police said. Authorities began busing out some of the hundreds of frightened and angry migrants.
“Even if they haven’t collected their pay, they prefer to lose the money. That gives the measure of their fear,” said Laura Boldrini, an official from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Italy.
Numbers
300,000 Immigrants in Italy in 1980, according to the national statistics bureau
3.9 million Immigrants in Italy last year, in a country of 60 million
