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Immigration in South Italy

Cornaiano 27. 02. 2008

“Immigration is the movement of people from their home towns to new countries, where they settle permanently or at least for a long time.”

Illegal immigration, which I’m talking about, is the same kind of movement with the only difference that the subject of action doesn’t respect the immigration laws of the destination country.

A strong example of this problem is represented by illegal immigration in Sicily. These immigrants are people from various countries of Africa (Somalia, Sierra Leone, Sudan Libya, Tunisia) and the Middle East (Turkish Kurds).They cross the sea with their families. The journey is very dangerous, because the boats, overcrowded or damaged, often capsize. Every year media report that several hundreds of immigrants died in the sea, a few kilometres from Sicily.
In May 2005 the authority found several boats near the coast of Siciliy, on which there were over 300 refugees. A lot of them were pregnant women. On the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, situated only a few kilometers from Sicily, the situation was terrible. In a refugee camp 300 immigrants were accommodated, while there would have been place only for at most 190 people. Many immigrants had to be flown to Sicily.
The fact that these people risk the life of the members of their families in such a careless way reflects only their enormous desperation and the poverty, in which they must have lived in their life. Their ambition is to live a better life and to give their children a better future.
To reach their dreams, illegal immigrants accept hard physical work in exchange of a very low payment. Besides that, they don’t have any health insurance or any other social support. In fact, they don’t have a residence permit from the State and so the administration can’t support them.
Illegal immigration causes also big economic problems. In fact, the employers often prefer illegal immigrants, who work for a low payment and for whom they don’t have to pay any taxes, rather than non-immigrant workers. Local employees, rather than beeing unemployed, accept always lower wages. It’s like a competition between the employees, by whom the person, who accepts the lowest payment, wins. This phenomenon feeds the exploitation of labor.

“People have migrated for at least sixty thousand years. The trend will continue.”
Roberto Paglia

Sources:
http://www.migrationsrecht.net/nachrichten-asylrecht/303-bootsfluechtlinge-boat-people-einwanderung-mittelmeer-malta-sizilien.html

http://www.bestofsicily.com/mag/art223.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration