Word: labor
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...critical praise and a 24-hour police guard. Saviano - who reported from within the Camorra, Italy's biggest Mafia clan with a global reach into fashion, real estate, waste disposal and drugs - says the rioters are among the hundreds of thousands of immigrants caught up in a brutal cheap-labor system the Mafia runs for legitimate businesses from Milan to Naples...
...Ironically, though, southern Italy's crime clans seem like a welcome wagon for the immigrants at the beginning, providing a deceptively accepting community for newcomers. "For the Mafia to keep them as low-priced labor, they create this atmosphere of tolerance," Saviano says. "They actually live better down there than in Milan. They are treated and paid like slaves, but the human relationships are warmer than those you would find in Milan. Africans say the Italian girls look them in the eyes in Calabria, while in the north they wouldn't." (See pictures of migrants being forced out in France...
...While the shootings were the apparent spark of the riots, the global economic downturn was a more distant cause. With budgets tightening, the E.U. cut its aid to southern Italian farmers, reducing the need for manual labor. "The Mafia wants to earn the same profits, and the workers are becoming a burden," Saviano says. Authorities have also turned a blind eye to their problems. Rather than increase social services or workplace regulations, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's administration has taken an increasingly popular anti-immigrant stance. About 1,000 of the African migrants in Rosarno were carted off to detention...
Dawn Pannell gained 35 lb. within the span of a few months, but she figured that was because of depression. She felt movement in her abdomen but assumed it was gas. She had mood swings but thought that was because of her recent unemployment. Finally, mistaking labor pains for constipation, she delivered a full-term baby into her toilet...
...residents in the country - 7.2% - was greater than Britain's. And in a country where the native-born population is aging rapidly, 1 in 6 babies delivered in 2008 was born to a foreign-passport holder. La dolce vita is also becoming ever more dependent on immigrants and their labor. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that foreign workers account for 9% of Italy's annual gross domestic product. They pick the fruit in the country's orchards, staff its restaurants and workshops and look after its young and elderly. "If all the migrants just stopped working...