ROSARNO, Italy — The official figures show there are 1,600 agricultural workers in this town, all but 36 of them Italians. The reality, exposed by the raw and violent riots here last week, was far different: Some 1,200 foreigners, most of them Africans, earned about $30 a day under the table picking oranges and clementines. Now that the town is largely cleared of foreign labor, the fruit remains on the trees.
In other places, $30 is not a living wage. But this is one of the poorest parts of Italy, and many local people do not earn much more, even if most will not pick fruit.
“Who is taking care of us?” asked Maria Amato, 39, a homemaker. “Until days ago, we didn’t exist.”
In a broad sense, the worst immigrant rioting ever seen in Italy — shocking here not only because of the anger of migrants, some of whom clashed with local residents, but also for the attacks on them by townspeople — cuts to the heart of the nation’s difficult evolution from a place of emigrants to one of immigrants.
But it is also a story fixed to this place. The economy is so weak here that locals and immigrants are competitors. In a town where people are reluctant to reveal their last names and often their first, a mysterious element complicates any full understanding of the riots: the ongoing strength of the Calabrian Mafia, or ’Ndrangheta, which has deep roots in agriculture. The son of a local organized crime boss was arrested and accused of wounding a policeman in the riots, suggesting that the mafia may have orchestrated the locals’ response to the immigrants’ violence.
“It’s a very, very complicated situation,” said Francesco Campolo, a police prefect who is one of three interim commissioners appointed by the region to govern Rosarno since the arrest last year of the mayor, who was charged with having organized crime ties.
This week, the absence of the immigrants, 1,200 of whom were whisked by bus and train to detention centers over the weekend, was clear. On Tuesday, firefighters demolished a former factory that served as seasonal housing for many migrants. It stood, just barely, a long roofless space of tin shacks, dirty mattresses, hand-me-down clothes, mud and garbage.
Alberto Cisterna, who oversees Calabria at Italy’s National Anti-Mafia Commission in Rome, called Rosarno the Corleone of Calabria, where clans of the ’Ndrangheta exert “extraordinary control.”
Official estimates indicate that the ’Ndrangheta did 44 billion euros, or more than $60 billion, in 2008, in international drug and arms trafficking, public works fraud, usury and prostitution.
Many authorities say that in a town where the ’Ndrangheta is strong, the presence of the immigrant workers must have been welcome, or at least convenient.
They note that agriculture is not profitable if transportation and labor costs are high and producers pay about 75 cents for a carton of fruit.
In any case, most agricultural outfits may have Italians on the official rolls, but they pay migrant workers under the table to harvest the fruit — if it is harvested. For years state authorities have not cracked down on the arrangement.
Calabria, like other southern Italian regions rich in agriculture, has long benefited from hefty European Union agricultural subsidies. To prevent fraud in which small acreage yielded puzzlingly large harvests, in 2007 the European Union changed its rules to base subsidies on the number of hectares planted rather than the tons produced.
The result, some authorities hypothesize, is that it may be more lucrative for some Calabrian landowners to let their harvests rot on the tree and collect the subsidies than to pay pickers. In theory, the migrants may have become less useful and, possibly, less tolerated.
Still, over nearly two decades, their presence had become part of the fabric of Rosarno, whose 16,000 residents included an estimated 2,500 immigrants. This week some local shops were hurting for the migrants’ business.
Like many Rosarno residents, she vehemently defended what the townspeople had done over the years to help the migrant workers and was outraged that they had wounded residents. “Ninety-nine percent of us helped them,” she said. And in the riots, she said, “they destroyed the town.”
On Monday evening, Rosarno residents held a peaceful protest, marching through the city’s flat concrete grid with a sign that read: “Abandoned by the state, criminalized by the media. Twenty years of cohabitation isn’t racism.”
But conversations with residents revealed a more complex reality. Many used an oft-heard phrase in Italy: “We’re not racist, but ....” Ultimately, they tended to say that maybe things were better without the immigrants, since it was hard enough for the Italians to make a living.
The city commissioners say that the riots were fueled by wild rumors on both sides. The immigrants had heard that local residents killed an immigrant, while local residents had heard that immigrants had wounded a pregnant woman so badly that she lost her baby. Both rumors were false, the commissioners say.
Still, the violence was dramatic. After immigrants struck residents and shops with sticks and burned and smashed cars, residents began responding with violence. By late Saturday night, most immigrants feared for their safety and voluntarily boarded buses and trains that took them to immigrant detention centers elsewhere in southern Italy, Rosarno authorities said.
Those with residency permits, which Doctors Without Borders says could be as many as half, were free to leave. Alessandra Tramontano, the director of Doctors Without Borders’ seasonal workers program in Italy, said the group was “worried” about where the immigrants would go and “how they will manage the winter, which historically had been spent in Rosarno.”
Meanwhile, early Tuesday morning, a special team of Italian firefighters was using demolition equipment to take down the factory where many had been squatting in conditions widely denounced as inhumane.
Mr. Campolo, one of Rosarno’s commissioners, said that even before the riots, the city had received state money to remove the immigrant encampment, which sits next to a middle school, and build a playground and sports fields.
It also plans to build a meeting center, with some health care facilities and dormitories, for the migrant workers. Mr. Campolo said the city planned to go ahead with the project. “Of course,” he said, “for the immigrants, when they come back.”
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