Reading I NEED HELP ON MY HOMEWORK

Journal of Rural Studies 88 (2021) 491–499

Available online 28 May 2021 0743-0167/© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

‘Ghetto tomatoes’ and ‘taxi drivers’: The exploitation and control of Sub-Saharan African migrant tomato pickers in Puglia, Southern Italy

Emilia Melossi School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9SJ, UK

A R T I C L E I N F O

Keywords: Caporalato Differential inclusion Racialisation Crimininalisation Tomatoes Southern Italy

A B S T R A C T

This study focuses on the exploitation and control of Sub-Saharan migrants who pick tomatoes in the Capitanata area in the South Italian region of Puglia. Large-scale organised distribution puts pressure on the growers to seek cheap agricultural labour, which is currently largely provided by migrants. The historical phenomenon of the caporalato labour contracting system is still widely practised and impacts in particular the Sub-Saharan migrants. Through the application of the concept of differential inclusion, the study focuses on the subordinate layering processes to which the Sub-Saharan migrants are subjected: racialisation, ‘refugeeisation’, criminalisation, deportability and invisibility. The ethnographic case study of the ‘taxi-driver’ sheds light on the difficulty in identifying caporali who have traditionally been blamed for a system that exploits labourers while instead protecting the owners. Recent anti-caporalato laws have been ineffective in contributing to the creation of a more just labour system and have only served to increase the pressure on the Sub-Saharan migrants for whom work is synonymous with survival.

1. Introduction

The paper investigates the nexus between migration and agriculture through a case study of Sub-Saharan African migrants working in the tomato fields in the outskirts of Foggia, a large provincial town in the Puglia region of Southern Italy. The term ‘ghetto tomatoes’ refers to the tomatoes picked in summer and the ‘ghetto’ refers to the migrant shantytown settlements. In fact the latter term is frequently used by journalists, as in ‘Ghetto Economy’ (Mangano, 2014) and ‘Ghetto Italia’ (Sagnet and Palmisano, 2015), as well as by the residents themselves when referring to where they live. The emotive term ‘ghetto’ was orig- inally used as early as 1516 to describe the section of Venice in which Jews were segregated. The ‘taxi-driver’ refers to the migrant who drives the migrant workers to the fields.

The tomato production in this area relies heavily on caporalato, a labour contracting system that has existed in the agricultural sector in the South of Italy for a very long time. In the last twenty-five years, it has taken on new characteristics because both workers and caporali (labour contractors) are of non-Italian origin and live and work in dire condi- tions. The current caporalato system exploits migrant workers playing on their vulnerabilities, including high unemployment and a dependency on work for claiming legal status in the country. The system lives off deductions from the hired worker’s salary, justified as reasonable

compensation for the procurement of work. This study analyses the ways in which migrants are subjected to

differential inclusion in society and are segregated and marginalised in border areas of invisibility (Mezzadra and Nielsen, 2013). The migrants’ differential inclusion is rooted in socio-economic, legal and cultural factors which include racialisation and criminalisation (Calavita, 2005), invisibility (Semprebon et al., 2017), deportability (De Genova, 2002) and ‘refugeeisation’ (Dines and Rigo, 2015). The end goal is the creation of a flexible, replaceable workforce of non-citizens.

The paper is divided in six sections after the introduction. Section 2 is devoted to context and methodology and offers a description of the two ‘ghetto’ shantytowns where field research was conducted and personal relations with the migrants were established. Section 3 describes the structure of the tomato industry in the Foggia area, known as the ‘Capitanata’, and the caporalato labour contracting system. Section 4 presents the theory of differential inclusion which illuminates how Sub- Saharan migrants are controlled through the processes of racialisation, criminalisation, invisibility, ‘refugeeisation’ and deportability. Section 5 presents empirical findings and focuses on the role of the ‘taxi-driver’ and the impact of recent anti-caporalato policies on the shantytown residents. Section 6 offers an analysis of the empirical findings and proves the enactment of the subordinating and layering processes on the Sub-Saharan migrants. The conclusions in section 7 underline the

E-mail address: [email protected].

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Rural Studies

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jrurstud

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2021.04.009 Received 23 April 2021; Accepted 29 April 2021

Journal of Rural Studies 88 (2021) 491–499

492

fundamental importance of shifting the view of Sub-Saharan labourers from migrants to workers.

2. Context and methodology

This section describes the field research, the type of relationships established with research participants, and access to the field through a collaboration with ‘Radio Ghetto’, a local activist group. In summer 2017, I volunteered for the Radio Ghetto project and conducted participant observation of labour migrants in their self-organised and creative self-expression activities through the radio. The Radio Ghetto project organises migrant-run radio broadcasts directly from the shan- tytown and promotes migrants’ self-representation, political awareness and the creation of a participative communication experience that connects the undocumented workers in the agricultural lands round about. This experience of direct communication and participatory media representation was an important source of information for the research and a great focal point for conducting participant observation, since my position as ‘participant observer’ was less linked to my positionality as a white Italian female among African men (compare Medland, 2021, this issue), and more as a radio participant. By actively participating in the management of the radio station, I was able to experience the daily life of Sub-Saharan migrants and the socio-economic context of the ‘ghetto’, spending most of my time with the other volunteers in the Radio Ghetto hut in the ‘ghetto’ itself, where the radio is set up and daily broadcasts take place during the picking season.

The core field research was conducted during summer and autumn of the following year, 2018, at two shantytowns – La Pista and Ghana House. The field research would have not been possible without the help, support and friendship of many residents of both shantytowns.

La Pista, the shantytown where I conducted most of my research, is geographically positioned on the outskirts of Foggia, near Borgo Mez- zanone, a small agricultural town founded in 1934, during the Fascist regime. La Pista – originally a NATO air base now in disuse (in fact La Pista translates as ‘The Runway’) – has developed as an informal set- tlement of containers and shanties built of wood, metal and second-hand materials. Approximately 800 migrants live at La Pista throughout the year, but the numbers increase substantially during the picking season, reaching a high of 1500 to 2000 migrants. The main origin countries of the migrants are Sudan, Somalia, Mali, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Gambia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria and Guinea (Dines and Rigo, 2015).

The total sum of interviews conducted during field research was 57: of these, 30 were interviews with shantytown residents, 16 with local Italian residents who volunteer or work for non-government organisa- tions, associations or faith-based organisations, and 11 with Radio Ghetto activists. In addition to conducting participant observation and interviews at La Pista, I conducted 10 interviews at Ghana House. This second shantytown is located near a small village called Borgo Libertà, built in the early 1950s as a service centre for the land reform which attempted to transform the area (King, 1973). The informal settlement of Ghana House was founded at the beginning of the 1990s and is mainly composed of abandoned farmhouses originally built as part of the land reform (riforma fondiaria) enacted in the 1950s (Caritas Report, 2017). Today, the two main migrant nationalities in the settlement are Gha- naian and Nigerian, but there are many migrants from other countries as well: Burkina Faso, Sudan, Niger, Togo, Mali, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Cameroon and Tunisia. Caritas (the Catholic charity organisation), based in Cerignola, the neighbouring town, has attempted to establish the numbers of the informal resident population, which vary from winter to summer, fluctuating between 250/280 and 900/1000 mi- grants (Caritas Report, 2017).

The 2018 fieldwork research lasted five months and involved inter- viewing and conducting participant observation. The first three months were spent conducting 30 interviews with migrants in the two shanty- towns, La Pista and Ghana House. The ensuing two months were spent interviewing local Italian residents, volunteers, NGO workers, faith-

based organisation workers and activists. In the shantytowns, the three key informants were ‘Omar’, ‘Lamin’

and ‘Souleyman’ (all pseudonyms), who represented different realities and different networks, connected to their activities, livelihoods and housing situation. During the first month of field research, carried out in August 2018 at Ghana House, I made friends with Omar who was interested in narrating his story and enabling interaction with his housemates. During the second month of field research, conducted at La Pista, I interviewed the migrants participating in the radio broadcasts as well as their friends and neighbours in the nearby shacks. During the tomato season, the radio hut becomes base camp for the radio project itself while during the year, base camp is in effect Lamin’s home. Lamin is the second key informant. During the third month of field research, I interviewed all of the habitués of Sunset Bar, Souleymane’s restaurant. I was very good friends with Souleymane from the previous year and he welcomed me to his house and his restaurant and vouched for me with all of his friends and clients. Souleymane is the third key informant.

The fourth and fifth months were spent interviewing 16 Italian res- idents from Foggia, Cerignola and Bari, who either work or volunteer for local NGOs, faith-based organisations (primarily Caritas) and other or- ganisations. The interviewees included doctors, lawyers, migration centre workers and volunteers. Most of the interviewees work at La Pista or Ghana House, or at other nearby locations. I also conducted 11 in- terviews with Radio Ghetto activists who have been volunteering and coordinating the radio project since 2012. These interviews were con- ducted in Rome where most of the activists live when the radio is not in operation.

3. Tomato production

Tomato production involves three main elements: the price of a case of tomatoes, seasonality of the harvesting period and cost of machinery, as described in Ciconte and Liberti’s ‘Filiera sporca’ (2016) and in Per- rotta (2017). The case study analysis presented in this paper highlights how the fresh hand-picked produce sector is dominated by time-sensitive picking due to product ripeness and occasional adverse climate conditions. Without the exploitation of migrant workers, pro- ducers would be unable to provide the market with the agreed upon product at the agreed upon rate and time (cf. again Medland, 2021, this issue). Production is determined by the globalised pressures of large retailers and the tomato industry’s hierarchical chain. As Corrado et al. observe, the agricultural sector in the South of Europe and in most Mediterranean countries has changed radically in recent decades:

The expansion of export-oriented agri-food production in Mediter- ranean countries has fostered internal and transnational migration; and on the other hand the availability of cheap and flexible migrant labour has represented a fundamental factor in the restructuring of the agricultural sector on both sides of the Mediterranean. In particular the compression of labour costs has enabled, to a certain extent, the resilience of a number of Southern European small and medium-size farms squeezed by neoliberal globalization and, more important, has contributed to strengthening the corporations and retailing companies that control vertically integrated agri-food chains. (Corrado et al., 2017: 1).

Between 1990 and 2010, the average farm size in Italy increased while the number of holdings decreased, leading to a concentration of land ownership (Corrado et al., 2017: 5). An increasing amount of food trade passes through corporate supermarkets both at the national and supranational level, giving large distributors more power over suppliers and excluding traditional independent food shops. Corporate super- markets increased their share of the market from 44% in 1996 to 71% in 2011 which has resulted in a concentration of large distributors that tends to monopolise the market (Corrado et al., 2017: 8).

E. Melossi

Journal of Rural Studies 88 (2021) 491–499

493

3.1. The structure of the tomato chain

Valued at over 3 billion euros a year, the tomato processing industry, which includes all types of processed tomatoes including peeled to- matoes, chopped tomatoes and tomato sauce, represents a key section of Italy’s overall agricultural production. Every year, 5 million tons of to- matoes are produced on Italian soil, on an area of just over 70,000 ha, mostly in the provinces of Foggia, Caserta, Potenza (in the South), and Parma, Piacenza and Ferrara (in the North).1 Italy is the third largest tomato processor in the world, after the United States and China, and produces almost 50% of all European tomatoes. Most of the tomatoes are transformed into pulp or peeled tomatoes and sold in cans or bottles: 60% is for export, while 40% is for internal consumption. Although Italy is one of the biggest tomato producers and transformers in the world, the Italian tomato industry is in perennial crisis because the price of fresh tomatoes, as well as the processed product, has been decreasing on a yearly basis (Perrotta, 2017: 60). The pyramid chart (Fig. 1) illustrates the tomato industry’s hierarchy in Italy.

The distribution chain is composed of three main segments: the producer organisations, the processing industries and the large-scale organised distribution. The producer organisations (POs) were foun- ded in order to access the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy funds and to aggregate farmers and make them more competitive, forcing the in- dustry to negotiate with them as a group. In reality however, the (POs) are managed by former traders and not by real producers. The pro- cessing industries buy the tomatoes during the harvest season, between mid-July and the end of September. The large-scale organised distri- bution structure controls the entire production chain by dictating un- sustainable prices before the beginning of the harvest season through different policies, specifically the ‘private labels’ and the ‘online double downward auctions’.

Supermarkets have developed business strategies such as the ‘private label’ commodity chain, through which they can impose their own standards on suppliers including quantity, quality, prices and packaging. The result is that small and medium-sized farms struggle to meet the

strict requirements while the larger producers benefit from production on a large scale and become the sole suppliers of the supermarkets’ private labels (Ciconte et al., 2016: 27). The strategy developed by large distributors, known as the ‘online double downward auctions’, is a system in which prices are established before the harvest season starts. The large distribution companies request an offer for a certain number of cans of tomato paste and the processing industries propose various prices. After that, the distribution companies open a second auction and this time the upper-baseline is the lowest offer from the previous auc- tion, thus forcing the industries to propose prices and offers in a downward spiral. The second auction lasts only a few hours and, as in the previous round, the lowest offer wins. Due to this system, the in- dustries offer prices in spring before the summer harvest and before the contracts have been signed. This way industries are forced to sell at impossibly low prices in order not to lose the auction and the economic pressure is then distributed further down the line onto the producers, and eventually onto the workers in the fields (Ciconte et al., 2016: 30).

3.2. The capitanata and the caporalato

From the 1860s to the 1980s, the industrial tomato was cultivated in the Agro-Nocerino-Sarnese area (Campania region, west coast of Southern Italy), but as a result of rapid urbanisation and a powerful virus that attacked the tomato plants, the land became barren and the crops were destroyed. The tomato producers were therefore forced to move to a new area, the Capitanata in Puglia, which today is the main production area in Southern Italy, accounting for approximately 40% of the coun- try’s entire production (Ciconte et al., 2016: 12).

Puglia has very few processing industries, the largest is Princes Industrie Alimentari (PIA) based in Incoronata, near Foggia. The remaining processing industries are located in Campania, so that the harvested tomatoes are still transported from the east coast to the west coast of Southern Italy (Perrotta, 2017: 62). The long distance between the production area and the processing industries results in higher transportation costs. It also weakens the producer’s negotiation power when dealing with processing industries by negatively affecting price negotiations, harvesting plans, price volatility, and shocks due to adverse climate conditions. Without a local producers’ organisation, the power dynamics favour the processors in Campania over the producers in Puglia.

Roughly 15% of tomatoes harvested in the Capitanata are picked by hand. In the case of hand-picking, the labour contracting system known as caporalato is the most common practice. ‘The caporalato is a system of informal farm labour contracting that ensures that teams of day laborers are efficiently organised and taken “just in time” to the businesses that require them’ (Perrotta, 2015: 199). The caporalato has been in opera- tion in the area for over a century and up until the 1970s, it employed what were known as forestieri (outsiders), Italian workers from neigh- bouring districts. In the 1970s the agricultural sector in Puglia under- went a serious economic and labour restructuring process which culminated with the inclusion of unskilled women in the labour force, which labour theorists have termed the ‘feminisation’ process (Caraway, 2005; Standing 1999). With the arrival of Sub-Saharan migrants in the 1980s, women were partially substituted by the new arrivals who were willing to work for 25 to 35 euros for 8–12 h days, with wages based on piece rates by crate instead of an hourly or daily wage (Perrotta, 2015: 199).

In 2016 an anti-caporalato law was passed, which made it possible to prosecute not only the labour contractor (caporale), as had been the case since 2011, but the employers and landowners as well. The new law was supposed to provide a strong ad-hoc tool to combat labour exploitation and protect the workers, but up until now it has been criticised for its inadequacy and its obvious limited effect, since it is not supported by actual economic, social and labour policies. There is a strong risk in fact that criminalising the current system is actually obstructing the emer- gence of a more just and fair labour contracting system (D’Onghia and

Fig. 1. Tomato industry hierarchy chain: distribution chain at the top in blue, production chain at the bottom in green

1 This study focuses on the Italian regions that produce tomatoes for the processing industry, not for fresh consumption. Sicily, on the other hand, is the number one Italian region for the production of tomatoes for fresh consumption (http://www.italiafruit.net/DettaglioNews/33775/la-categoria-del-mese/focu s-pomodoro-da-industria-e-da-mensa-produzioni-import-export-consumi-prezzi ).

E. Melossi

Journal of Rural Studies 88 (2021) 491–499

494

De Martino, 2016: 39). As Soumahoro (2019) and D’Onghia and De Martino (2016) suggest,

there is a high risk of further criminalising an already marginalised and racialised group. Palmisano’s book, Mafia Caporale (Palmisano, 2017), explores the caporalato system as ‘organised crime’, while Perrotta (2015) suggests instead that caporalato is a system of work-brokers who mediate between the need of the landowners to get the work done and make a profit, and the need of the migrants to work in order to survive. The caporale’s profit is based on his team-workers since he claims a percentage of their wages. For this reason, he is interested in insuring that they be paid. Migrant workers who accept to work under the caporalato system should not, however, be simply considered victims of the system. They are in fact active subjects in the sense that they know that this is the only way for them to access work. As Perrotta claims, the main issue is work (2015: 17).

The exploitation of agricultural workers is frequently treated as a temporary emergency, whereas in reality the phenomenon has historical roots. Attributing the exploitation solely to the relationship between the caporale and the worker fails to take into consideration all the aspects involved in the tomato production (Soumahoro, 2019: 77), considered in more detail below.

4. Differential inclusion: racialisation, criminalisation, invisibilisation, ‘refugeeisation’ and ‘deportability’

The caporalato system and the structure of the tomato production process subjects workers to a very strong level of workplace control in conjunction with low wages, long hours and inhuman working condi- tions. Sub-Saharan migrant workers are further exploited through various layers of discrimination based on race issues, legal status and policies of exclusion.

The system of control can be represented as an analytical framework that sheds light on how Sub-Saharan migrant workers are effectively controlled. The system of control is layered, enforced, enacted and implemented by various actors and can be effectively analysed through the application of the theoretical concept of differential inclusion (Mez- zadra and Neilson, 2010, 2013). Differential inclusion is extremely useful in explaining how migrants, although physically present in the nation-state territory, are not fully included in society. As the case study reveals, Sub-Saharan migrants are included in the labour market – although only at a subordinate level – and excluded from accessing basic rights. Sub-Saharan migrants are in fact included only in a subordinate condition and under stratified levels of acceptance through ‘subordina- tion, rule, discrimination and segmentation’ (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013: 19). Differential inclusion gives rise to the creation of internal borders, which are then internalised by the migrants themselves. The internal border is a permeable layer that both accepts and rejects in- dividuals, exploiting them at different levels, and thus becomes the space in which the struggle for labour and human rights naturally takes place.

Differential inclusion is directly connected to the concept of border – not as an external delimitation of the state’s sovereignty – but as an internal multi-layered border system that differentially includes migrant workers at various levels of subordination based on race, gender and legal status (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). Both the undocumented and ‘refugeeised’ Sub-Saharan migrant workers fall into the category of non-citizens. The presence of non-citizens has moved the concept of border from an external delimitation of the state’s sovereignty to a complex system of internal borders that divide and challenge the state itself. In fact, the ‘illegalisation’ of labour migrants determines the cre- ation of internal borders that draw the insider/outsider binary category throughout the sovereign territory (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). Castel (2007) underlines the exclusionary aspect of the process of internal- isation of borders that delimits, for example, the French banlieue as a space of exclusion. ‘The banlieue as such is a frontier, a border area and a frontline’ (Balibar, 2007: 48). Ghettos, favelas, slums, and banlieues are

internal temporal spatial borders (Castel, 2007) that cut across geographical divides and are evidence of the spread of internal borders in the contemporary world. Thus, the segregation of undocumented migrants in shantytowns outside the cities in Southern Italy geograph- ically demarcates the existence of internal borders.

The theory of differential inclusion is applied in order to expose the different layers of subordination to which Sub-Saharan migrants are subjected: racialisation, criminalisation (Calavita, 2005), invisibility (Semprebon et al., 2017), ‘refugeeisation’ (Dines and Rigo, 2015) and ‘deportability’ (De Genova, 2013). These processes overlap and coexist at various levels and reinforce the subjugation and subordination of Sub-Saharan migrants. Racialisation and criminalisation are directly tied to Italy’s high levels of xenophobia, which in turn drive local gov- ernments to want to ‘hide’ the shantytowns in an effort to maintain the invisibility of the migrants.

Kitty Calavita’s (2005) comparative study between Italy and Spain highlights the key role of race in determining the segmentation of the labour force and the racialisation and criminalisation of undocumented migrants through media communication. The media plays the main role in the construction of the frame which is the symbolic structure that gives meaning to social events. The ongoing main frame in the Italian context is: ‘foreigners and criminal immigrants, just like enemies’ (Dal Lago, 1999: 70). Dal Lagos’s work on ‘Non-persons’ (1999) explains the role that the media holds in Italy in constructing the strong correlation between immigration and criminality by playing on the ‘fear machine’, based on fear of the enemy, the migrant. Newspaper headlines regarding the informal settlements in the Capitanata area, and in particular the media event discussed in section 6, offer clear examples of the attempts on the part of the Italian media to re-construct the facts and events in support of the general rhetoric of migrants as dangerous criminals. Calavita writes:

For, immigrants are not just excluded, they are criminalized; they are not just different, they are dangerous. Above all, they are racialized. And that racialization is part and parcel of the economics of altérité, as those who at other times and in other places were themselves declared racially inferior now construct others in that role. The dy- namic is at once structurally driven and fuelled by politicians and a media that are drawn to, and make careers from, the frightening and the macabre (Calavita, 2005: 125).

As Calavita adds, ‘criminalisation is a symptom of immigrants’ racialisation, and at the same time feeds it’ (2005: 146). Calavita’s writings highlight the close correlation between racialisation and criminalisation, and support the fieldwork-based findings of Semprebon et al. (2017) who analyse the Moroccan manual-labour circuit of agri- cultural work and present a case-study comparison of Rosarno (Calabria, Southern Italy) and Sermide (Lombardia, Northern Italy). In both loca- tions, the findings confirm a tendency, on the part of local institutions, to limit the visibility of seasonal migrant agricultural workers. This ten- dency is explained as an attempt by local institutions to address the perception of migrants as a threat to public order. The rhetoric that depicts and represents the presence of migrants as an obstacle to maintaining public order, is built on news reports by the media and speeches by well-known Italian politicians (Calavita, 2005: 129–136) reflecting the high levels of xenophobia across Italy. As recent survey data reports:

Compared to a European average of 57%, Italian respondents who believe that immigrants contribute to criminality, represent 74% of the entire sample, with a difference of 17 percentage points.

For this reason, the ghettoised and segregated spaces of informal settlements in this study are spatially isolated and intentionally physi- cally invisible. Informal settlements are usually situated in rural areas at a significant distance from local residents and are perceived as tempo- rary and non-permanent (Semprebon et al., 2017). Furthermore, many

E. Melossi

Journal of Rural Studies 88 (2021) 491–499

495

agricultural day labourers move across Italy from one rural area to another for different seasonal harvests; ‘in winter they pick citrus fruit in Calabria, in spring they pick strawberries in Campania, and in summer they pick tomatoes in Puglia and Basilicata’ (Perrotta 2015: 198). This increases the migrants’ invisibility since they are constantly on the move.

In addition to being racialised, criminalised and rendered invisible, the Sub-Saharan migrants are further differentially included as either ‘deportable’ undocumented migrants or ‘refugeeised’ workers. In fact, the shantytown migrant workers fall under the category of either a refugee or an undocumented migrant. The 2011 INPS report stated that 75,000 migrants were employed in the agricultural sector in Southern Italy (INPS 2011:198) and approximately 20% had Sub-Saharan origins. In recent years, many of these workers have remained in Southern Italy employed in seasonal harvests (Dines and Rigo, 2015: 3). At the peak of the tomato harvest in the Capitanata, between 15,000 and 20,000 mi- grants work in the agricultural sector. In the 2005 report, ‘Doctors Without Borders’ estimated that 60% of agricultural migrant workers in Italy in 2005 were undocumented, and 96% possessed no work contract (Medici Senza Frontiere, 2005). The percentage of undocumented workers however has changed since 2005, and now most migrants possess some form of legal status (Dines and Rigo, 2015: 4). A more recent study by ‘Doctors for Human Rights’ (Medici per i Diritti Umani, 2015: 15) reported that a majority of agricultural workers have a resi- dence permit for international protection or humanitarian reasons. Therefore, as Dines and Rigo (2015) suggest, Sub-Saharan shantytown residents are composed of two main groups, differentiated on the basis of the outcome of their asylum-seeking application. The osmotic flow between the two groups is related to recent migration policies: asylum seekers on the one hand, who hold some kind of temporary refugee status, and undocumented migrants on the other. The undocumented migrants are often failed asylum seekers, who have applied for asylum status but have been denied. As a result of this situation, both groups are employable and exploitable for different reasons.

Migrants with undocumented legal status face challenges on a daily basis. As De Genova explains:

‘Illegality’ (much like citizenship) is a juridical status that entails a social relation to the state; as such, migrant ‘illegality’ is a pre- eminently political identity. Undocumented migrations are, indeed, pre-eminently labour migrations (De Genova, 2002: 422).

Undocumented migrants therefore fill the most exploited role among workers in the labour market and offer a reserve army of precarious labour tied to their mobile, fluctuating and expendable position in destination countries (Standing, 2011). They represent in fact the most expendable and flexible workforce since they may be deported in mo- ments of low productivity without causing social tensions and are thus completely controlled by the employer (De Genova, 2013). At the same time, they also represent a ‘permanent’ resource, since deported workers can always be substituted with new and fresh undocumented migrants.

The migrant ‘just-in time’ production regime, which is the result of a post-Fordist labour model (Calavita, 2005) and the cornerstone of the present globalised production process, is based in part on a ‘just-in-time’ migration system. Today’s highly globalised economic system is entirely reliant on flexible production and outsourcing mechanisms in which demand is always fluctuating and the only way to satisfy the frequent and variable fluctuation is to render labour completely responsive to the high volatility of demand (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013).

The only option for Sub-Saharan migrants, who have not obtained any type of refugee or asylum status, is to apply for a temporary resi- dence permit, which is strictly connected to a job contract. But, when migrants fall into unemployment, they are no longer able to renew their work permit and thus automatically revert to ‘illegality’. If migrants have been refused international or humanitarian protection, the only possibility they have to obtain permanent residence and to aspire to a

more durable and secure legal situation, is to work regularly with a formal contract (Calavita, 2005: 35). It is thus clear that the state seems to be renouncing its own decision-making power regarding the assign- ment and allocation of residence and citizenship rights, leaving it up to the employers to define the migrants’ status and rights.

The second group of shantytown residents is composed of migrant workers who legally reside in the country for humanitarian reasons. They have job-seeking permits and international humanitarian protec- tion status. Since 2011 the official quota system, which is supposed to regulate the legal entry of non-EU workers into the country (decreto flussi), has been blocked, thus creating a gap in the labour market by ignoring and failing to supply the high number of workers necessary to satisfy the high demand for low-skilled labour in the agricultural sector.

The labour market gap has been filled by East Europeans and Sub- Saharan migrants with refugee status or international humanitarian protection. Dines and Rigo (2015) define the recent increase in the refugee workforce as a ‘refugeeisation’ process and underline how the emergency-crisis humanitarian-based policies have become the norm instead of the exception. The migration flow policies have colonised the migrant labour policies and migrants enter and reside in the country based on ‘humanitarian’ rather than work-related policies. ‘To put it bluntly, the failure of the quota system to meet the agricultural demand has been offset by the growing number of asylum seekers making the decision to cross the Mediterranean Sea’ (Dines and Rigo, 2015: 16).

Both groups of migrant workers, undocumented and ‘refugeeised’, are thus employed in the agricultural sector without being considered official workers. This system treats the migrants as not ‘real’ workers and links their existence in the country to the ‘refugeeisation’ process.

5. The ‘taxi-driver’ and ‘the chase’

The empirical case study reported below offers evidence of the manner in which differential inclusion subjugates and subordinates Sub- Saharan migrants through the layering processes presented in the pre- vious section. The case study focuses on the role of the taxi-driver who personifies the ongoing conflict between the constant attempt to control the migrants and their own impelling need to re-assert individual agency. In addition, this section describes the arrest of a taxi-driver in the shantytown and the media reportage of this event.

The role of the taxi-driver in the informal migrant economy is complex and unclear and varies on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes, the taxi-driver is a caporale. In this case, the person who drives the workers to the fields is also the person who recruits them and pays them, with- holding usually 0.50 euros per crate. Frequently however, the taxi driver is not a caporale and, just like the workers he transports to the fields, he too is employed by the caporale. The uncertainty regarding the distinct and overlapping roles of the taxi driver as caporale creates confusion and the possibility of shifting and deflecting responsibilities affecting labour conditions and wages.

During the 2018 season at La Pista, there was a strong crack-down on the taxi-drivers, who were generally assumed to be caporali. As reported by interviewees, the police attempted to confiscate cars coming and going from the shantytowns in an effort to catch the caporali. This was done especially towards the end of the picking season when the number of taxi-drivers operating in the area had already started to decrease, making the possibility of catching taxi-drivers a more successful oper- ation. The crack-down on the taxi-drivers was not only an attempt to demonstrate superficial compliance with the anti-caporalato law but also a response to public pressure and media reports regarding the appalling living and working conditions in the shantytowns.

The police started to stake out La Pista, usually in the early morning, in order to catch the cars and mini-vans full of workers on their way to the fields. The police tactic was to stop the ‘taxis’ on the pretext of checking vehicle registration, insurance and licenses and any irregu- larities they found were cause for legitimately seizing the cars and mini- vans. Sometimes, the police would end up chasing a car that had failed

E. Melossi

Journal of Rural Studies 88 (2021) 491–499

496

to stop at the check point, creating an intense conflict between the ve- hicles containing the taxi-drivers and the workers, trying to get to their work site, and the police cars trying to stop them. In the interviews, the migrant workers reported various survival strategies. For example, sending a licenced and insured driver with an empty car to scout the entrance and exit roads around the shantytown in order to establish whether or not the police were on the lookout. Another strategy was to drop off the workers on the way back from work in the middle of the fields, far away from the shantytown so as to avoid getting caught. The walk back to the shantytown however is extremely dangerous since the surrounding roads are completely dark at night. This survival strategy enacted by the taxi-drivers, further endangered and complicated the lives of the workers.

The alliance between the taxi-drivers and the workers is based on a common interest: reaching the work site. The taxi-drivers are paid only if the workers they transport reach their work sites and are able to earn a day’s wages. The average fee that workers pay for transportation is 5 euros which, when considering an average daily wage between 20 and 30 euros (Oxfam, 2018: 4), is rather high, but workers struggle to reach their work sites since there is no public transportation available. Mi- grants sometimes utilise bicycles but the distances between the shan- tytowns and the worksites are often too great.

The taxi-driver has become the scapegoat for the anti-caporalato policy and efforts to implement the new anti-caporalato law. The taxi- driver is obviously one of the most easily accessible targets in the caporalato hierarchical system, but focusing on catching taxi-drivers who may or may not even be caporali, is simply a way to avoid the more complex issues involved in the system of exploitation of Sub- Saharan migrant workers.

Condemned to working for long periods of time in the fields at substandard wages, the possibilities that a Sub-Saharan migrant worker has for improving his own situation, are practically non-existent. Thus, the option of becoming a taxi-driver becomes a valuable alternative to the exhausting work in the fields and, although more dangerous, still offers an opportunity to assert individual agency in a context in which there seem to be no other choices. Becoming a taxi-driver however, also means participating in the unfair labour system and thus being complicit in the exploitation of fellow workers. A taxi-driver in fact can demand payment from up to five people transported in a car and 14 in a minivan. However, a taxi driver may simply be a field worker who has agreed to drive a vehicle full of workers in exchange for not having to pay the transportation fee to a caporale.

Attempting to stop and chase vehicles, in a dangerous and aggressive way, on the part of the police is perceived by the migrant workers as an antagonistic action against them, rendering any possibility for collabo- ration, regarding the establishment of who the caporali and the land- owners actually are, all the more difficult and unlikely. Thus, the anti- caporalato policy implementation that focuses on the stake out and chase of ‘taxi-driver’ vehicles ends up contributing to the general criminal- isation of the Sub-Saharan migrant workers instead of identifying and prosecuting the actual caporali and the landowners who are directly responsible for the exploitation of the workers.

Most of the cars and minivans that enter and exit the shantytowns have non-Italian licence plates and are generally purchased on the black market from East European migrants (mostly Romanian and Bulgarian), who drive them from their origin countries to work in the Summer picking season in the area. The migrants purchase the used vehicles from the East European migrants to avoid questions regarding insurance, licensing, taxes and vehicle registration. The vehicles with Eastern Eu- ropean licence plates carrying ‘black’ migrants, visibly stand out in comparison with the local Italian ‘white’ drivers, giving the local police obvious visual clues and reasons for stopping the vehicles. This is evi- dence of a widespread practice of racial profiling which is the result of a strong interdependence between racialisation and criminalisation (Cal- avita, 2005: 146).

Furthermore, taxi-drivers are often chased by the police. The police,

as well as the media, have become facilitators of a national political narrative that criminalises shantytown residents and misrepresents them as crude exploiters of themselves, further enabling the imple- mentation of repressive and discriminatory policies hidden behind the well-intentioned attitude of the ‘white saviours’. The account below describes the police pursuit methods of a ‘taxi-driver’ juxtaposed with an extract from an interview with a taxi-driver. The next section then an- alyses the emblematic way in which the police and mainstream media reported a specific event that took place in the shantytown.

On September 4, 2018, Radio Ghetto activists at La Pista witnessed a somewhat terrifying event: one of the taxi-driver cars that was being chased by the police entered the shantytown at a very high speed with a completely dismembered tyre. The police had been shooting at the tyres in order to stop the car. The car actually came to a halt only when it reached the ‘junction’, the internal shantytown crossroad, where various boulders had been placed as barriers to protect the shantytown from unwelcome visitors. When the police car attempted to enter the shan- tytown and get closer to the taxi-driver car, the policemen were sur- rounded by shantytown residents who forced them to abandon their pursuit. The recent general crack-down on migrant cars had forced taxi- drivers to give up most of their vehicles. As the migrants explained, they had only two options if they were stopped: give up the car and start running into the fields as fast as possible, or drive away at high speed in order to escape. In interviews with various taxi-drivers, there was a lot of discussion regarding the two different tactics; some drivers had already lost two or three cars (just in the month of September) because they gave up their car and made a run for it. But one driver made it clear that he would never give up his car: ‘I will only stop when I am dead, as long as I am alive, I will keep on going and never stop’ (original in Italian: ‘Solo da morto mi fermo, finché vivo continuo ad andare e non mi fermo mai’).

The following event, which is based instead on public record, is emblematic of the way in which the media and government represen- tatives manipulate information. In doing so they actively engage in racialising and criminalising migrants, and thereby participate in con- trolling them. If migrants are portrayed as criminals by the media, then members of the police feel justified in carrying out aggressive acts against them since they – the police – are trying to prove that they are in control of the situation and are responding to calls for ‘law and order’ both locally and nationally.

On 5 October local newspapers reported that an African migrant taxi- driver had been arrested for resisting and attacking two policemen who had attempted to stop him at a roadblock. Media accounts claimed that the driver, Omar Jallow, had not only avoided the roadblock and sped away to escape the policemen, but had actually tried to run over one of the policemen. The police then chased the driver with their own car, later claiming that their service car had been rammed by the migrant. ‘After the chase, the crazy flight of the Gambian citizen ended at the existing settlement near the C.A.R.A. (Centro di Accoglienza per Richie- denti Asilo – Reception Centre for Asylum-seekers)’, according to the newspaper account. The account continued:

Once the two officers got out of the car, after having chased the migrant on foot, they managed to block him with great difficulty, not only for the violent resistance opposed by the man in an attempt to break free, but also due to the intervention of numerous other mi- grants who, in an attempt to help the migrant escape, kicked and punched the two policemen.“3

The then Interior Minister and head of the far-right Lega party as well as the main proponent of anti-immigration laws in Italy, Matteo Salvini,

2 Newspaper headline translated into English by the author. All subsequent translations are by the author (https://bari.repubblica.it/cronaca/2018/10/1 0/news/foggia_migrante_aggressione_poliziotti-208661293/).

3 https://www.immediato.net/2018/10/08/poliziotti-accerchiati-e-picchiati -a-borgo-mezzanone-interviene-salvini-balordi-torneranno-al-loro-paese/.

E. Melossi

Journal of Rural Studies 88 (2021) 491–499

497

took advantage of the media uproar that the event ignited and spoke about the incident:

In the province of Foggia, a police patrol was attacked and kicked by a group of asylum seekers for a simple check on a 26-year-old Gambian, in Italy with refugee status for humanitarian reasons, who had not stopped at a checkpoint. The man was arrested, while two policemen ended up in hospital for their injuries. Thanks to the new security decree these fools will return to their country. Even for them, the free ride is over.

After the incident became a media event, the residents of La Pista started discussing the way in which it had been reported and the fact that the two versions of the story, theirs and the media’s, failed to match up at all. When the arrest took place inside the shantytown, many mi- grants videoed the event with their cell phones. Discussions regarding police discrimination and racialisation led to a desire to denounce the misrepresentation of facts. The only listeners were ‘Campagne in Lotta,‘4

a group of activists who were able to get a copy of the video of Jallow’s arrest and successfully disseminated it on social media. The video was placed on Campagne in Lotta’s facebook page and posted by a limited number of newspapers. The video started circulating and it soon became apparent that the re-telling of the event and the facts involved had been distorted in order to ‘fit’ the mainstream government narrative which claims that all African migrant shantytown residents are ‘criminals’. The actual events that took place were as follows. The driver did not stop at the roadblock but continued to drive to La Pista. Once he arrived, he was forced to stop the car and continued fleeing on foot. While he was making a run for it, the policemen decided to chase him, but due to the environment – the streets at La Pista are full of garbage and trash which makes running a hazard – both Jallow, the migrant escapee, as well as the policemen chasing him, ended up tripping and falling on the ground amidst the trash. When the policemen were finally able to get back up on their feet and were able to arrest Jallow, they realised they too were bruised and cut.

When the local residents realised what was happening and started to record the events with their cell phones, the situation was the following: the migrant had been captured and handcuffed to the wheel of the police car (Fig. 2). In fact, in the photo, he is crouching and has a cut on the arm that is handcuffed to the wheel of the car. The local residents, visibly upset with the treatment administered to their fellow co-worker, are surrounding the police car and agents, trying to make their voices heard,

both in Italian and in multiple African regional languages. At some point in the video someone shouts: ‘Non ̀e un animale! (He is not an animal!)’. The policemen appear to be physically unharmed but visibly terrified. They are immobile and waiting for a back-up car to arrive.

Throughout the video, the divided reaction of the local residents is obvious. There is a debate as to whether they should rebel against the police and save one of their own, or instead give him up and follow the rule of law regardless of its unequal and unfair nature. The migrants surrounding the car are divided between ‘lascialo andare! (Let him go!)’ and ‘non può fare quello che vuole! (He [the migrant] cannot do what he wants!)’

The headers and summaries of the various local online newspapers that reported on this event, at the beginning, before the release of the Campagne in Lotta video, were obviously politically aligned. On October 8, 2018, Il Fatto Quotidiano, one of the outlets, reported: ‘50 migrants attacked two policemen in the Borgo Mezzanone ghetto. The agents, after following a 26-year-old Gambian who had tried to run them over, were surrounded and kicked and punched’. The local mayor was quoted: ‘We need more protection for those who are operating on the road, such as tasers’.5 Another local online media source, Foggia Today, reported: ‘Aggression against the Police in Borgo Mezzanone: visit of Lega par- liamentarians. Northern League MPs on Foggia after the attacks on the CARA: “We will bring solidarity from Salvini and millions of Italians”’.6

On 10 October, Il Fatto Quotidiano was forced to report the updated interview with Peppino Vigilante, the independent police union’s pro- vincial secretary: ‘The two policemen were not punched nor kicked. The videos speak for themselves.‘7 Vigilante added that 50 migrants had surrounded the police car apparently attempting to free their fellow co- worker, which is a crime, but he was forced to acknowledge that the initial statements were false. In fact, Jallow was acquitted of assault charges while two investigations were opened against the policemen for abuse of power.8 This is a rare example in which the government’s and media’s politically aligned narratives were successfully overturned, but it is rather the exception than the rule. The migrants’ voices are generally unheard and misrepresented.

6. Analysis of empirical findings

The media event and case study of the ‘taxi-driver’ and ‘the chase’ offer clear evidence in support of the concepts and theories presented in section 4. The two case studies involving taxi-drivers illuminate the aggressive and punitive actions and policies implemented against migrant workers and shantytown residents. The actions are part of the control mechanisms that subjugate the migrants. These actions, considered necessary in the fight against the caporalato system, ignore the need that workers have to reach their worksites. They also interfere with the need for cooperation and communication between the migrants and the police in order to determine the identity of the caporali and the landowners. As Soumahoro, a leading Italian-Ivory Coast trade unionist who has been working with and organising Sub-Saharan migrants in Puglia, stated: ‘taxi-drivers are not caporali, but workers or private car owners who offer their own vehicle in exchange for a fee in order to take the workers to the worksite’ (2019: 84). The stakeout and chase of the

Fig. 2. The migrant handcuffed to the wheel of the police car.2

4 ‘The Campagne in Lotta network was created with the aim of connecting workers - mainly foreigners - who work and live in different areas of the Italian agro-business, with individual militant groups.’ (http://campagneinlotta.org /en/__trashed-2/).

5 https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2018/10/08/foggia-la-denuncia-del-sap- 50-migranti-hanno-aggredito-due-poliziotti-nel-ghetto-di-borgo-mezzanone/ 4679031/.

6 http://www.foggiatoday.it/politica/aggressione-poliziotti-borgo-mezzano ne-parlamentari-lega-incontro.html.

7 https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2018/10/10/foggia-migranti-contro-la -denuncia-del-sap-a-borgo-mezzanone-nessuna-aggressione-ai-poliziotti-video/ 4682937/.

8 https://www.tgcom24.mediaset.it/cronaca/puglia/foggia-migrante-a mmanettato-alla-ruota-dopo-l-arresto-aperte-due-inchieste_3168541-201802a. shtml.

E. Melossi

Journal of Rural Studies 88 (2021) 491–499

498

taxi-drivers and the minivans exiting the shantytowns, represent ex- amples of racial profiling. Black migrants who exit the shantytowns are immediately viewed as caporali and therefore criminals, initiating the violent cycle of racialisation and criminalisation in which all black mi- grants are equated to criminals.

The police actions and the surveillance tactics carried out, as evi- denced in the case study, represent one of the main ways in which the process of criminalisation and racialisation is enacted on the ground. The police are one of the main actors that implements and carries out the law based on the general ‘media frame’ which considers migrants as criminals (Dal Lago, 1999). As the case study of Jallow’s arrest evi- dences, the media is the main actor that constructs reality by creating the frame through which social events are narrated and interpreted. The local newspaper headlines played an important part in framing Jallow and his fellow shantytown residents as guilty of violence against the police, creating justification for Jallow’s mistreatment, who was in fact cuffed to the wheels of the police car. Furthermore, the fact that the fellow residents felt the urge to scream: ‘he is not an animal!’ is proof that the police tactics and the general media discourse have a strong dehumanising effect on the migrants who experience it directly, compelling them to publicly counteract this process by stating the obvious: Jallow is not an animal. He is a human being.

In addition, Jallow had obtained the status of refugee but despite the protection and recognition of this status, he is included in society only at a subordinate level in the category of an exploitable worker (Dines and Rigo, 2015). He is subjected to the process of ‘refugeeisation’ whereby he is included in the informal labour market but denied the full range of labour and citizen rights. He is given the legal status of refugee instead of a work permit, defining his presence in the destination country on a humanitarian basis.

Furthermore, Jallow is not only part of the ‘army of labour’ that is illegally and irregularly employed in the agricultural sector, but he is also subjected to a second layering of subordinate processing: ‘deport- ability’ (De Genova, 2013). Matteo Salvini, who was interior minister at the time, made the ongoing and ever-present threat of deportability explicit when he stated that: ‘Thanks to the new security decree these fools will return to their country. Even for them, the free ride is over.‘9

Jallow is therefore not only subjected to the process of ‘refugeeisation’ but to the constant threat of deportability.

In the end, Jallow escapes the police and flees to La Pista, where he tries to go into hiding. La Pista is a place of invisibility (Semprebon et al., 2017), where unwanted migrants are segregated and Jallow hopes to become ‘invisible’ himself. Jallow is trying to use the process of subor- dinate layering and marginalising which he is subjected to on a daily basis, in his favour for once. He is trying to reverse the effect of the marginalisation process in order to survive but is unsuccessful in his attempt. In fact he is arrested at La Pista. Italian society has the power to render Jallow invisible when deemed necessary, but Jallow does not have that same power.

La Pista represents an internal border as theorised by Mezzadra and Neilson (2013), and a place of differential inclusion in Italy which rele- gates migrants to the invisible outskirts of society, while at the same time including them in the informal labour market as a necessary and fundamental workforce. In this light, Jallow’s case is emblematic of the way in which the processes of racialisation, criminalisation, ‘refugee- isation’ and ‘deportability’, affect his life and end up controlling his existence.

7. Conclusions

This study reveals the highly hierarchical structure of the tomato production industry in which migrant tomato pickers and in particular

Sub-Saharan migrants are relegated to the lowest level of the pyramid while large-scale organised distribution holds all decision-making power ensuring the ability to maximise profits. The Sub-Saharan migrant workers are not only subject to high levels of labour exploitation, but they are also controlled by the layering and subordinating processes of differential inclusion, which impact them, permeating all aspects of life. As (Soumahoro (2019: 61) states:

On the one hand, the market needs workers, the reserve army of la- bour, in order to carry out the harvesting in the fields at a very low cost and at practically unsustainable rates. On the other hand, security pol- icies and the culture of racialisation strip these labourers of their identity as workers and invests them instead with the identity of migrants, pre- venting them from being treated as human beings. Reducing them to a condition of invisibility.

An improvement in the wages and working conditions of Sub- Saharan migrants through a change in the system of tomato produc- tion, would have a positive effect on the life of the migrants themselves. Higher wages and better working conditions are what migrants need and seek in order to be able to better cope with the reality of the system of control which permeates their lives. Furthermore, changes in the system of control would require not only long-term efforts, but massive and radical cultural and political changes in Italian society. Thus the first step in improving the situation of the migrants is to recognise that their struggle is not just a migrant workers’ battle, but a fight for workers’ rights. Once again in the words of Aboubakar Soumahoro: ‘We are workers and as such we want to see our rights guaranteed’ (2019: 70). Indeed, protests, marches and strikes aim to present Sub-Saharan labourers not as migrants but as regular workers in Italian society.

Acknowledgement

I was awarded the SeNSS ESRC-funded studentship.

References

Balibar, E., 2007. Uprisings in the banlieues. Constellations 14 (1), 47–71. Calavita, K., 2005. Immigrants at the Margins. Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern

Europe. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Caraway, T., 2005. The political economy of feminization: from ‘cheap labor’ to

gendered discourses of work. Polit. Gend. 1 (3), 399–429. Castel, R., 2007. La Discrimination Negative: Citoyens Ou Indigenes? Seuil, Paris. Ciconte, F., Liberti, S., Novembre, 2016. Spolpati. La Crisi dell’industria del pomodoro

tra sfruttamento e insostenibilità. Terzo rapporto della filiera sporca. Terra. Corrado, A., De Castro, C., Perrotta, D., 2017. Cheap food, cheap labour, high profits:

agriculture and mobility in the Mediterranean. In: Corrado, A., De Castro, C., Perrotta, D. (Eds.), Migration and Agriculture, Mobility and Change in the Mediterranean Area. Routledge, London and New York, pp. 1–24, 2017.

Dal Lago, A., 1999. Non-persone. L’esclusione dei migranti in una societa’ globale. Feltrinelli, Milano.

De Genova, N., 2002. Migrant ‘illegality’ and deportability in everyday life. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 31, 419–447.

De Genova, N., 2013. Spectacles of migrant ‘illegality’: the scene of exclusion, the obscene of inclusion. Ethn. Racial Stud. 36 (7), 1180–1198.

Dines, N., Rigo, E., 2015. Postcolonial citizenships and the ‘refugeeisation’ of the workforce: migrant agricultural labor in the Italian Mezzogiorno. In: Ponzanesi, S., Colpani, G. (Eds.), 2015. Postcolonial Transitions in Europe: Contexts, Practices and Politics. Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, MD, pp. 151–173.

D’Onghia, M., De Martino, C., 2016. Gli strumenti giuslavoristici di contrasto allo sfruttamento del lavoro in agricoltura nella legge n. 199 del 2016: ancora timide risposte a un fenomeno molto più complesso. Working Papers Center for the Study of the European Labour Law ‘Massimo D’Antona’. IT – 352/2018.

Medici Senza Frontiere, 2005. I frutti dell’ipocrisia: Storia di chi l’ agricultura la fa. Di nascosto. Sinnos, Roma.

INPS, 2011. IV Rapporto sui lavoratori di origine immigrata negli archivi INPS: La regolarità del lavoro come fattore di integrazione. Edizioni Idos, Roma.

King, R., 1973. Land Reform: the Italian Experience. Butterworth, London. Mangano, A., 2014. Ghetto economy: Cibo sporco di sangue. terrelibere.org, Roma. Medland, L., 2021. ‘There is no time’: agri-food internal migrant workers in Morocco’s

tomato industry. J. Rural Stud. (this issue). Mezzadra, S., Neilson, B., 2010. Borderescapes of differential inclusion: subjectivity and

struggle on the threshold of justice’s excess. In: Balibar, E., Mezzadra, S., Sama‾dda‾ra, R. (Eds.), The Borders of Justice. Temple University Press, Philadelphia PN, pp. 182–203, 2010.

Mezzadra, S., Neilson, B., 2013. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Duke University Press, Durham, NC and London.

9 https://www.immediato.net/2018/10/08/poliziotti-accerchiati-e-picchiati -a-borgo-mezzanone-interviene-salvini-balordi-torneranno-al-loro-paese/.

E. Melossi

Journal of Rural Studies 88 (2021) 491–499

499

Oxfam, Giugno, 2018. Caso Studio Oxfam: Terra! Sfruttati. Poverta’ e Disuguaglianza nelle Filiere Agricole in Italia.

Palmisano, L., 2017. Mafia Caporale. Fandango Libri, Roma. Medici per i Diritti Umani, April 2015. Unfair Land. Report on the Working and Living

Conditions of Foreign Agricultural Workers. Perrotta, D., 2015. Agricultural day laborers in Southern Italy: forms of mobility and

resistance. S. Atl. Q. 114 (1), 195–203. Perrotta, D., 2017. Processing tomatoes in the era of the retailing revolution:

mechanization and migrant labour in northern and southern Italy. In: Corrado, A., De Castro, C., Perrotta, D. (Eds.), Migration and Agriculture, Mobility and Change in the Mediterranean Area. Routledge, London, pp. 58–75, 2017.

Caritas Report, 2017. Cerignola. Proposta Progettuale [Unpublished]. Sagnet, Y., Palmisano, L., 2015. Ghetto Italia. Fandango Libri, Roma. Semprebon, M., Marzorati, R., Garrapa, A.M., 2017. Governing agricultural migrant

workers as an ‘Emergency’: converging approaches in Northern and Southern Italian rural towns. Int. Migrat. 55 (6), 200–215.

Soumahoro, A., 2019. Umanità in rivolta. La nostra lotta per il lavoro e il diritto alla felicità. Feltrinelli, Milano.

Standing, G., 1999. Global feminization through flexible labor: a theme revisited. World Dev. 27 (3), 583–602.

Standing, G., 2011. The Precariat: the New Dangerous Class. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York.

E. Melossi