Farm Worker Killings Shed Light on Migrant Abuse in Italy

The abject cruelty of harnessing migrants as cheap labor is currently on horrid display in Italy and, just as in America, the nation’s leading political figures are shocked to discover such outrages occur. Five migrant farm workers on June 2 were intentionally set on fire by their overseers. Four died.

The victims – four Afghanis and one Pakistani – “had been working under poor conditions and low wages on a strawberry farm in Calabria in southern Italy, a practice commonly referred to as caporalato,” Politico Europe reports.  

The term is used to describe a “gangmaster system” with organized criminal ties that controls the exploitation of migrants as farm labor in Italy. Yes, the practice is so widespread that it has its own coined name. The brutality involved is often staggering.

‘Barbarity’ Upon ‘Barbarity’ in Italy

“The migrants rebelled against their handlers after they did not receive their pay for weeks and the trafficker demanded transport money,” Politico Europe writes of the heinous incident. “CCTV footage of the attack shows two men locking the workers in a van, and then setting it on fire at a gas station.” 

The atrocity garnered international attention, causing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to speak out. “The horrific murder of the four farm workers in Calabria has shocked us all,” Meloni wrote in an X post. “Italy does not back down in the face of violence and barbarity: it is essential to shed full light on this terrible crime and bring all those responsible to justice.”

This would be the same Meloni who was elected in 2022 as a fiercely nationalist anti-immigration hardliner only to almost immediately pivot to staunch advocate of the need for Italy to import massive numbers of migrants to fill the jobs Italians won’t do. Sound familiar?

“Italy will issue nearly 500,000 new work visas for non-EU [European Union] nationals from 2026 to 2028,” Reuters reported in June 2025, “as part of a strategy to expand legal immigration channels in response to labor shortages. “A total 164,850 people will be allowed in next year, aiming to reach a cumulative total of 497,550 new entries by 2028.”

It’s not the first wave she has invited in. The prime minister commonly referred to as “far right” in the dominant press in Europe and the US was doubling down on an action she first took three years earlier. “[T]he government issued 450,000 permits between 2023 and 2025,” UK newspaper The Telegraph notes.

As is widely evident in America, normalizing the use of foreign migrants as cheap agricultural labor opens the door to debasement on a massive scale. In Italy, abuse of foreign farm workers has long been an open secret. “The most recent agro-mafia and gangmastering report, published in 2022 by the Placido Rizzotto observatory, estimates that around 230,000 people are exploited in Italian fields, a quarter of all agricultural laborers,” Euro News reports.

“The study shows that irregular work is particularly widespread in Apulia, Sicily, Campania, Calabria and Lazio, where it is estimated that over 40% of workers have an irregular contract or no contract at all,” the news site writes.

Nightmarish accounts regularly make news headlines. Indian farm worker “Satnam Singh, 31, died in a hospital in Rome… two days after being injured while working in a melon greenhouse in the Agro Pontino, a rural area south of the capital,” Reuters reported in June 2024. “According to media reports, Singh was left outside his home after suffering injuries to his arm and legs, with his severed limb placed in a fruit crate.”

Meloni was once again quick to express her shock and dismay. “These are inhumane acts that do not belong to the Italian people, and I hope that this barbarity will be punished harshly,” she said at the time. There’s that B-word again.

Why, then, is Meloni encouraging the importation of more cheap, non-European labor in this very same job sector?

‘Everyone Knows’

The Telegraph in March profiled Dante Picotti, who operates a dairy farm an hour north of Rome, and one of his Indian workers. “Picotti, is thrilled with Ms. Meloni’s policy” to bring in more migrant workers, “as are employers across Italy’s sectors struggling with labor shortages, from agriculture to tourism,” the paper stated.

“Young Italians don’t want to do this work,” Picotti told the paper. “They’re too mollycoddled. They stay at home until they are in their thirties, having their meals cooked and their laundry done for them.

“The Indians, by contrast, are serious people. They work hard, they are diligent, they are respectful. If you ask them to turn up for work at 6 am, they turn up at 6am on the dot – not 6:30 am.”

Beyond this clichéd defense of the need for foreign labor there lies a much more destructive attitude. Numerous quotes from a report by The New York Times on Satnam Singh’s grisly 2024 death reveal just how blasé Italians are on the caporalato scourge.

“Everyone knows that migrants come and work illegally,” Francesco Fasani, an economist at the University of Milan, told the paper. “In Italy, legal quotas end up fueling the illegal ones,” said Natale Forlani, president of Italy’s National Institute for Public Policy Analysis, “a public research institute overseen by the Labor Ministry.”

And perhaps most damning of all:

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

But is it really an entire society supporting such a construct in Italy and all the other nations of an inundated West? Or merely a well-off and powerfully connected segment financially benefitting from a corrupt system that scars and degrades the greater community it no longer considers itself a part of?