Laborer’s Death Brings to Light Italy’s Conflicted Relationship With Migrants

Italy, an aging country, badly needs migrant labor and immigration, but the government has admitted that the pathways for legal entry are rife with abuse.

When Satnam Singh, a migrant fruit picker from India, chopped his arm off in an accident in June as he worked in fields near Rome, his boss, instead of taking Mr. Singh to a hospital, dropped him off in front of his house with part of his arm in a fruit basket. Shortly afterward, Mr. Singh died.

He had arrived in Italy in 2021 from the Punjab region on a temporary worker’s permit, then remained working illegally for more than two years, hoping in vain that an employer would legalize him, the police said. Instead, he found himself, like so many other migrants, ground up in a nearly feudal system that offers scant protections to some of Italy’s most necessary workers.

Mr. Singh’s death, at 31, stirred an uproar in Italy this summer, setting off a new round of soul-searching about the country’s conflicted relationship with immigrants.

Italy, with its aging and dwindling population, desperately needs foreign workers, but the public discourse has been dominated for years by talk of how to keep migrants away. Now, even those who had warned of “ethnic replacement” of Italians by foreigners, including Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, have acknowledged the need for immigrant labor.

Her government has vowed to improve pathways for migrants to work legally in Italy, a system that experts and Ms. Meloni herself have said is rife with abuse, leaving many vulnerable to exploitation and blackmail.

“Satnam is the symbol of a system,” said Marco Omizzolo, a sociologist who for years has focused on migrant workers in the vast Agro Pontino farmlands in the central Lazio region, where Mr. Singh died.

Ms. Meloni called Mr. Singh’s death “disgusting,” saying it “does not reflect” Italy. She has tried to draw a sharp line between regular and irregular migration by cracking down on illegal arrivals by boat while also significantly increasing the number of work permits for migrant laborers.

In reality, the distinction between regular and irregular migrants remains blurry, experts said.

Many migrants, like Mr. Singh, come on seasonal contracts but then remain and work illegally in the country once those permits expire. Others come under the promise of a contract, but are never given one as the government’s current quotas for legal migrant workers do not bind employers to hire the migrants they bring in.

“In Italy, legal quotas end up fueling the illegal ones,” said Natale Forlani, the president of Italy’s National Institute for Public Policy Analysis, a public research institute overseen by the Labor Ministry. He added that for now, “Italy does not have a regular immigration policy worthy of the name.”

Francesco Fasani, an economist who focuses on migration at the University of Milan, called Italy’s entry system a “legal fiction.”

“Everyone knows that migrants come and work illegally,” he said.

Being already in the country, with no contract and sometimes with no permit, the workers are easy prey for unscrupulous employers. Mr. Singh’s story was emblematic of the risks and rampant abuses many migrant laborers face, experts said.

“If a whole society accepts that slaves exist,” said Gianfranco Schiavone, a leading expert on Italy’s migration law, “we can’t complain if one master is more evil than the others.”

In the Agro Pontino, the region about an hour south of Rome where Mr. Singh died, large numbers of Sikh workers from India pick kiwis, watermelons and zucchinis. The farmland there was reclaimed from malaria-infected swamps under Mussolini.

Mussolini also founded several cities in the region, and hard-right sympathies remain firmly rooted there. In the cafes among geometric, Fascist-style buildings, workers routinely refer to their bosses as “padrone,” which roughly translates as “master.”

Numerous investigations have revealed how workers are generally paid a few euros an hour, with contracts that grossly underrepresent the hours they work or with no papers at all. Employers have been known to seize the workers’ documents to keep them beholden to them. Middlemen, sometimes immigrants themselves, keep a large part of the workers’ slim salaries in exchange for backbreaking work in the fields and filthy housing.

Occasionally, an especially horrific act of abuse puts the system under a harsh new light, but the outcry fades and the exploitation continues.

Mr. Singh’s treatment, according to the account provided by Lt. Col. Michele Meola of the Carabinieri police, was particularly cruel. Mr. Singh was working with a plastic-wrap machine in June when his arm got stuck in it. A good chunk of it was completely smashed, Colonel Meola said.

Afterward, Mr. Singh’s boss drove him and his partner, Soni Soni, 26 — who was also working in the fields — to their house. She later testified in court that their boss “threw” Mr. Singh from his van, leaving his head bleeding, as well, according to her lawyer, Gianni Lauretti.

The defense lawyers for Mr. Singh’s boss, Antonello Lovato, said in a statement on Tuesday that a witness, employed by Mr. Lovato, said in court that Mr. Singh had spontaneously decided to use the plastic-wrap machine and that it was Ms. Soni who had asked Mr. Lovato to take Mr. Singh home.

Ms. Soni instead said that she had urged Mr. Lovato to take Mr. Singh to the hospital, according to her lawyer, Mr. Lauretti. Ms. Soni cried for help, and eventually an ambulance came, but it was too late. Mr. Singh died in a hospital soon after.

Mr. Singh’s boss, who had gone back to his farm to wash the blood from his van, was arrested in July, Colonel Meola said. Ms. Soni has received a residence permit while the investigation is underway.

After Mr. Singh’s death, Italian investigators inspected dozens of companies in the area and found irregularities among half of the workers they checked. Most were migrants, they said in a statement, some were even minors.

Similar practices span Italy. This summer, the police in the northern city of Verona said they had freed 33 people from “slavery.” The workers said in a statement that two Indian middlemen had lured them with the promise of seasonal labor and a 17,000 euro contract, or nearly $19,000. When they arrived, they worked for 10 to 12 hours a day seven days a week while receiving no payment to extinguish their supposed debt.

Critics say that such abuses are driven in part by a lack of checks, organized crime and ruthless profiteering. But the tenor of the public discourse around immigration in Italy has also made it harder to put in place the pragmatic steps the Italian government is trying to take, they say.

“The contradictions are everywhere,” said Matteo Villa, a researcher who focuses on migration at the Institute for International Political Studies, a research center based in Milan. “This transition doesn’t work if you keep telling people that we don’t want them.”

Today, Italy and Europe pay millions to North African countries like Libya and Tunisia to keep migrants away, and Ms. Meloni has credited the arrangements for a drop in the numbers of arrivals to Italy this year.

The strategy has attracted praise from other world leaders, but also criticism after reports that Tunisia was abandoning thousands of migrants in the desert, and that migrants had suffered violence, forced labor and exploitation in detention centers in Libya.

Ms. Meloni has also struck an agreement with Albania that allows Italy to send migrants who are rescued in the Mediterranean to detention centers there while their asylum claims are considered. That facility is scheduled to be opened in the coming weeks.

In the Agro Pontino, many migrant laborers said they believed that a feeling of superiority and impunity drove their employers’ attitudes.

Saiful Islam, 36, a Bangladeshi immigrant who lives in the area, summed up their reasoning this way: “‘You are an immigrant, you should be content with whatever you get.’”

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