Word: southernization
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Xenophobes in homogenous European countries often complain that immigrants will erase their most precious cultural norms. The race riots in southern Italy last weekend may be one indicator that change is inevitable, as African immigrants who don't live by the country's infamous omertà code of silence violently protested against the powerful Mafia clans that control their lives, says Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah, an anti-Mob book that earned him both 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...
...riots in Rosarno, which reportedly began after three Italian teenagers fired air rifles at two African immigrants, unsettled a nation that prides itself on its bella figura - the beautiful image. About 2,500 migrants live in the Rosarno valley in the southern Calabria region, moving with the seasonal agricultural jobs. Many have political asylum or are otherwise legally in Italy, but legal or not, the migrants are managed by a Mafia-run employment system, the caporalato, that operates like a 21st century chain gang. Saviano says that those who object to low wages or poor working conditions are simply eliminated...
...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...
...Tensions flared most recently last week when the Chinese government announced it would begin developing high-end tourism on a few of the Paracels as part of an ambitious new plan to draw tourists from around the world to Hainan, a Chinese island province off the mainland's southern coast. But while planners dream of creating a Chinese Hawaii - with the Paracels' clear waters a potential luxury destination for divers - the leaked proposal made Hanoi bristle almost instantly. China has retained de facto control over the archipelago since seizing it in its entirety with gunboats in 1974, but Vietnam...