Migrants bused from riot-struck Italian town

Bloody clashes between African migrants and residents in one of Italy's poorest regions over the last few days brought home a national dilemma Saturday: Many Italians don't want to pick crops in the south or toil in the north's factories, but resent the desperate foreigners who will work for a pittance, AP reported.

Premier Silvio Berlusconi last year dismissed any notion of a "multiethnic Italy." His conservative coalition, which includes the anti-immigrant Northern League party, has repeatedly cracked down on illegal immigration, sometimes drawing the ire of human rights advocates, U.N. officials and the Vatican.

With opinion surveys showing that many Italians blame immigrants for crime, tensions persist between citizens and foreigners - and sometimes erupt into violence, as they did these past days in Rosarno, a town in Calabria, an underdeveloped southern agricultural region with chronic unemployment.

At least 38 people were wounded in the violence, which began Thursday night when two migrants were shot with a pellet gun in an attack the migrants blamed on racism. Violence continued Friday with clashes involving Africans, Rosarno residents and police. Among the more seriously wounded were three migrants beaten with metal rods.

By Saturday, the violence had largely subsided, except for a pellet-gun shooting that wounded a migrant on the outskirts of town, police said, and authorities began busing out some of the hundreds of frightened and angry migrants.

Others, lugging shabby suitcases or tossing duffel bags over shoulders, headed for train stations or left in cars if they could arrange rides, said Laura Boldrini, an official from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Italy.

"Even if they haven't collected their pay, they prefer to lose the money. That gives the measure of their fear," Boldrini said in a telephone interview from Rosarno.

Perhaps half the 1,000 or so migrants - from Ghana, Nigeria and other African nations - chose to stay for now, many sleeping in tents or cardboard "rooms" in a dilapidated, abandoned former cheese factory on the outskirts of town.

Some have work permits, many are clandestine workers and others have refugee status, said Boldrini.

Just over a year ago, two migrants were shot in Rosarno, one losing his spleen, Boldrini said. Then, the migrants reacted with a "peaceful march."

This time "the immigrants reacted with violence, and this in turn triggered a spiral of violence," the U.N. official said.

Many of the migrants in Rosarno came from Italy's north after factory jobs dried up last year because of the economic crisis, Boldrini said. That increased the migrants' pool of labor for backbreaking dawn-to-dusk crop picking paying about euro20-25 ($30-37.50) a day.

Although unemployment runs some 20 percent in the south - and at least double that among youth - few locals are willing to work so hard for so little: The kiwi, mandarin oranges and other citrus fruits are harvested by the migrants.

The latest violence "must be an occasion to reflect on immigration policy," said Boldrini. While there are clandestine migrants, "their work is needed and they are exploited," she said.