 On June 17 and 18, migrant rights groups and progressive organizations held mobilizations in the cities of Naples and Taserka in Italy. They demanded peace, social justice and the regularization of undocumented people. Migrants play a key role in the Italian economy, especially in agriculture. However, they continue to face difficult living conditions and poverty and precariousness in addition to institutional racism. What is the role played by migrants in the Italian economy and what kind of conditions to the Indio? Maurizio Coppola of Pote Rea Al Papolo, one of the organizations supporting the mobilization talks about these issues. Labor market is dominated by migrant labor. Around 10% of the total workforce is foreign workers, are foreign workers, so like 2.3 million people are foreigners working in the Italian economy. And the important thing is like to see that there is not only the agricultural industry that is dominated by migrant labor, but also other sectors. And first of all, for example, logistics. The logistics in the northern part of Italy, it's a very important sector that in the last 20 years increased a lot and in which precarious working conditions are dominant. And there you find a lot of people from Bangladesh, Pakistan, but also from Morocco and Egypt working in these sectors. It's like in Emilia-Romagna, it's a region where and Dombardia, two regions where the logistics is concentrated. And we had a very important wave of struggle in 2010, 2011, 2012, both all by the irregular workers without residence permit, which struggled for better salaries, for better working conditions and linked to this improvement of the working conditions, of course, also to receive papers to be regularized because the two things come together. If you are an irregular worker, the possibility to put pressure on you and to pay lower salaries, it's higher. So there was like a very important wave of struggle during the like 10 years ago. But during the pandemic also, during the pandemic, we had like migrant workers of the logistics saying, we are living in like collective shelters where nothing is done, no measures to protect the people from COVID. And in the same time, if we get COVID, we cannot go to work because it is forbidden to work. So this is a contradiction we cannot accept that like the costs of COVID is put on the shoulder of the migrant workers. And so there was also like struggles for better protections in the collective shelters by these workers in the logistics. But of course, we have, as you said, the agricultural industry, it's above all in South Italy where people from the African continent are working. And they're the huge question, it's above all the working hours, the salaries also, because we have their like a system that puts pressure on migrant workers of the African continent, and they receive like two, two euros, three euros maximum per hour. And then also the question of the housing because there are like ghettos around these huge fields in the southern part of Italy, in which the migrant workers are living in very precarious conditions without water, without electricity. And there are also a lot of people also dying there in these ghettos because fires are breaking out and so on. And so also there in the last 10 years, we had huge and important mobilizations by the migrant workers. And the third sector I wanted to mention, it's the care sector above all women from Eastern Europe are working there. And they during the pandemic, they really felt the pressure and this precarious condition without security and without protection, because they were fired because the elder people they feared to catch COVID. And so like these migrant women workers in the care sector are living inside of the houses of these people. They said we do not want to have foreigners in our house. So we fire you. And this is something that, yeah, of course, when you speak about the economy in 2021-22, as I said, like 10% of the total workforce in Italy is connected to the migrant workers. But in 2021-22, 35% of the people losing their job because of the pandemic, they were migrant workers. So like the impact of the crisis, it is much bigger and stronger on migrant workers. In 2020, the Italian government introduced a regularization program, which was supposed to address many of these issues faced by migrants. Has this policy worked? Yeah, it was incredible, because the day it was announced, the agriculture minister came to the TV and started to cry and to say how problematic the situation of migrant workers is in Italy. And so the government presented like a regularization program that then at the end only focused, and this is one of the main problem, only focused migrant workers in two sectors. That means in the agricultural sector and in the care sector. The two sectors most impacted by the crisis in the sense that the workers there had most problems and difficulties to have a safe situation, to have measures to protect themselves from COVID. So this is one of the huge problems of the regularization program. Then we have a second huge problem that is that the migrant worker had to pay €500 to start the procedure of regularization. Of course, it is a way also to put a handicap to the migrant workers to have a real regularization. And then the third discriminatory moment of this regularization program is that the employer of the migrant worker had to denounce himself as an employer of irregular work, but of course prevented a lot of them to regularize their workers. So they said, no, why should I do it? If till now I could hire them without problem, if they are irregular without their permit and so on and so on. So it is a very discriminatory regularization program. And this regularization, this discriminatory moment, we see it also in the numbers. The Ministry of Interior received around 250 applications for regularization in the first months. Two years later today, it's two years later, we have more than 50% of these applications that have not been elaborated because of different forms of institutional racism and malfunctioning. So there is like an impossible, they demand impossible things to the migrant regular workers papers they can never receive because there is no embassy or no consulate in Italy of their origin countries. The offices are just closed. So you cannot go there as a migrant and make formalize your procedure of regularization. So a huge amount of problems, racist problems but also like malfunctioning of the institutions show today that this regularization program is not working and the people are still waiting for their responses and they are still working also in very precarious conditions today. The organizers of the mobilization have presented certain concrete demands to the Italian government. What are these proposals? I think we can summarize the demands on two levels. The first level is a very concrete level of like working in life conditions of the migrant workers. The message is very clear it is impossible to respond to the huge amount of contradictions migrant workers are living with emergency measures. So we cannot just say in August 22 we need an emergency measure to regularize migrant workers. We need a structural intervention by the government and it is exactly what the organizations are demanding. A collective regularization of migrant workers with no resident permit with no documents. It is the only way to be sure that these people can continue working, that these people who also paid for a long time because black regular work is also like a gray zone. They continue paying like social insurance but they are not regular in the territory so they do not have the right also to have access to the social insurance they pay for. So this is also a way to protect them to give them security to allow them also in the longer term to stabilize their lives in Italy. But of course there is also a second element of the demonstration. A very political one, a very strong political one because there is the World Refugee Day in June 20 and of course this World Refugee Day has a special significance this year. The escalation of the war in Ukraine has introduced the possibility of a new world war and the militarization of the conflict is producing even more deaths and refugees since the beginning of the war. Officially there are like 6.6 million refugees from Ukraine and the countries around. But since the beginning of the conflict also like the Western countries are militarizing, weaponizing the conflict and and and treating also refugees differently among their origin, their country of origin. So like people still fleeing from Afghanistan, from Ethiopia, from Syria are like they are receiving closed doors and the refugees of Ukraine they have like the open doors. As it should be, we are not saying that the refugees from Ukraine should not come to Europe, to the Western countries of Europe, Italy and so on. But we have to treat all refugees in the same way. So there is really a very strong also character of peace of social justice and against inequalities in these demonstrations today and tomorrow. And today, as we said in Naples, 5,000 people, 5,000 migrants took to the streets and this is a huge number for Naples. This is a huge number of people really saying no, you have to react, you cannot accept anymore what is going on. Tomorrow the demonstration will be in Gazerta. Gazerta is in the north of Campania, the region of Naples and a lot of migrant workers are working there in the fields in the agricultural sector. So it is very important also to support the demonstration tomorrow and the first step was a success. Now there are like meetings also with the Ministry of the Interior, with the regional ministries to improve the situation of migrant workers in Italy.