Trapped in Europe’s largest migrant settlement: The forces sustaining Italy’s informal economy

Abdul Camara, a 31-year-old Senegalese man, agrees to show EL PAÍS his house: it took him seven years to build it with his own hands.

He takes out his key and proudly opens the door. Inside, there’s nothing but four walls and a tiled floor. Each tile is a different color (he has collected them over time). It’s just one more house emerging in the ghetto of Borgo Mezzanone, as it is commonly called in Italy. The informal settlement is located near the city of Foggia, in southern Italy. Locals refer to it as “The Runway” because, for two decades, it has grown alongside the runway of a disused military airfield from World War II. This serves as the settlement’s main street: it’s the only paved surface. The rest becomes a mud pit on cold, rainy days.

With the so-called “Calais Jungle” — a refuge for foreigners attempting to cross the English Channel — having been dismantled in France, this is now the largest informal settlement of undocumented immigrants in Europe. It guarantees cheap, undeclared labor for the vast agricultural plain of the area, which produces 40% of Italy’s tomatoes. In summer, the Borgo Mezzanone ghetto has up to 4,000 residents.

This region is called the Capitanata, a term from the Byzantine Empire. It was established in the Middle Ages, a fitting history for a place where people still live in medieval conditions. The informal settlement is home to people from dozens of countries, from almost all of Africa and parts of Asia, who have been undocumented for up to 10 years. There’s no running water and no sewage system. Residents rely on generators and a tangle of wires that steal electricity from the power grid. And, because the grid is constantly failing, for the past three years, only half of the camp has electricity one day, with the other half getting it the next. Mountains of garbage are piled up in an open field, with municipal trucks only occasionally coming to collect it. There are three tanks of drinking water that are filled every three days by tanker trucks, and they’re emptied within hours.

The ghetto of Borgo Mezzanone isn’t formally recognized. However, here, there’s more life. There are more cars, more shops and more people than in the nearby village proper, where only 400 residents live, with just a bar and a supermarket. However, officially, it’s the settlement that doesn’t exist: it’s a village in the dark. Inside the shacks, there are bars, butcher shops, hairdressers, clothing stores, mechanic shops, two churches and a mosque.

Half-an-hour away, in Rignano, there’s another ghetto named Torretta Antonacci. It houses up to 2,000 people. And there are more of these settlements across southern Italy. They exemplify the perverse effects of how the country has managed immigration for decades, creating an underworld of invisible workers without rights, condemned to marginalization.

While Spain has just announced a plan to regularize the status of 500,000 undocumented people, the government of far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni — which doesn’t want any more immigrants — is actually obstructing the NGOs that rescue them in the Mediterranean, while intending to deport asylum seekers to Albania. And, while Spain is on track to legalize half-a-million people, the Italian government has approved the entry of exactly the same number of foreign workers who can enter the country between 2026 and 2028. But this is being done surreptitiously, through the so-called “migration flow decree.”

Italy’s complex, opaque and fraud-prone system — which has been in place for two decades, under all kinds of governments — aims, in theory, for the orderly entry of foreigners, based on labor needs. Italy requires immigrants in the fields, in factories and in homes. However, the country prefers to maintain a system that pretends they don’t exist and ensures that the majority remain invisible. In 2024, labor inspections in the province of Capitanata revealed that 64% of workers were undocumented.

These 500,000 permits — to be distributed over the course of three years — are allocated like tickets for a rock concert: there are successive “click days” for different job sectors, when the applications open on an official portal for employers and individuals.

“It’s a system that doesn’t work,” Francesco Mason says. He’s an immigration lawyer and member of the Association for Immigration Legal Studies (ASGI). “Politically, they don’t want to face reality; the government sees immigration not as a resource, but as a necessary evil. It’s politically and humanly unacceptable. The regularization process that Spain has implemented is much more effective: it immediately acknowledges the reality, promotes integration and benefits the labor market,” Mason explains.

The number of entry permits granted is always lower than the actual demand. This year, for example, the quota is 164,000 spots. But by January, there were already 194,000 pre-applications. Furthermore, the system relies on the fiction that an Italian businessman knows the name and surname of a man in Ghana whom he wants to hire. Often, it’s a disguised regularization process; someone already living in Italy without legal status is hired, under the pretense that they’re abroad.

In 2024, only 7.8% of those who ultimately arrived in Italy signed a contract and obtained a residence permit. This is according to the latest study by the Ero Straniero project, a collaboration of eight NGOs and civic associations. The rest fall into illegal status after setting foot in Italy. This is also because, in many cases, the immigrants are scammed: according to unions, they pay at least $6,000 to intermediaries and the employer who “hires” them in order to go to Italy… only to discover, upon arrival, that the company doesn’t exist.

Many of the residents of Borgo Mezzanone arrived this way, although most reached Italy by sea and applied for asylum. After their applications were rejected, they received a deportation order. Hence, from that day forward, they were undocumented. It’s estimated that there are between 500,000 and one million foreigners in Italy in an irregular situation.

“They live in constant fear of being arrested. It’s a system designed to break them, to reduce them to slavery, denying them their rights. The decree on migration flows is a huge farce,” says Emanuela Mitola, from the Unione Sindacale di Base (USB) office. This major Italian trade union provides legal assistance in the informal settlement. She opens her office at 4 p.m. to help residents resolve their immigration issues. On Thursday, February 5, a lawyer was also visiting. Within minutes, about 50 people were waiting their turn, documents and photocopies in hand. Each person had a complicated story about bureaucracy and years of waiting.

Abdul Camara — the Senegalese man — arrived in Italy back in 2015. He worked for three years in a factory in Turin, until he lost his papers. No one would give him a contract. And so, he ended up here, where there’s always work. He’s been living in the ghetto for seven years; he’s paid between €35 and €50 a day, sometimes €70 (a range of $41 to $83). It all depends on the employer and the job. “Of course I’d like to leave. But I can’t. They give me work here, but not elsewhere,” he explains. Besides, with what he earns, he couldn’t afford to live anywhere else.

Camara believes the Italian businessmen he works for are “good people.”

“They give us coffee and a croissant for breakfast, they feed us well, but they can’t give me a contract, even if they wanted to,” he reasons. When asked about the infamous decree on migration flows, he barely knows what it’s about.

Camara smiles. He likes Italy and hopes to leave the settlement. But surviving in the ghetto is tough. It’s been infiltrated by the local mafia; in recent months, there have been two homicides, as well as a death from tuberculosis. And, on January 23, a Gambian worker — 38-year-old Mamadou — was found dead from exposure in the car where he was sleeping.

Above all, the migrants are crushed by a mechanism designed to squeeze them to the maximum. It’s still based on the archaic system of the caporalato — the exploitation by the hand of the caporale, the foreman. This intermediary decides who works and then takes people to the fields.

The NGO Associazione NoCap works to combat this system and try to relocate the occupants of these ghettos through legal contracts with reputable companies. It was founded in 2017 by Yvan Sagnet, a Cameroonian man who is now 40-years-old. Back in 2011, he, too, ended up in one of these southern Italian ghettos. He organized the first strike and helped secure the passage of the law against the caporalato in 2016. “If I had known what it was like, I wouldn’t have gone, just like most immigrants who end up there. I never imagined such places existed in Europe,” he recounts. He arrived in Turin in 2007 to study on a scholarship. But when it ended in 2011, he needed to work. He was told that there were jobs in the region of Apulia, so he went there.

“When I arrived, there were 1,200 people and six bathrooms. I slept on the floor. I would have gone back to Turin, but I had no money. When I asked how to find work, they told me to talk to the caporale. It was the first time I’d ever heard that word. They told me I wouldn’t have any trouble recognizing him,” he recalls. And this was true. An African man appeared: he called himself Silvio Berlusconi (all the foremen used millionaires’ names). He was known as the capo nero — the one who selected the workers — to distinguish him from the capo bianco, the businessman. He told Sagnet to show up the next day at four in the morning to pick tomatoes.

According to Sagnet, the foreman arrived with a windowless van meant for nine people, but he crammed in 25. They were paid €3.50 ($4.17) for each 300-kilo box of tomatoes. Working 16 hours a day, from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m., Yvan managed to fill four boxes, earning a total of €14 ($16.67). But the foreman deducted €5 for transport, €3.50 for a sandwich and €1.50 for water. “I came back with €4. It was one of the hardest moments of my life,” he admits. A few days later, he organized a strike that lasted 45 days. The migrants blocked a road in the middle of summer — when Apulia is full of tourists — and they appeared on television. Sagnet became an advocate for immigrants’ rights. And, in 2016, he was awarded the Order of Merit for Labor by Italian President Sergio Mattarella.

Associazione NoCap now finds work for around 1,000 people a year. “We get calls from many desperate business owners who need workers,” Sagnet says, adding that the main problem is finding them housing. Francesco Strippoli — head of NoCap in the province of Capitanata — travels through the ghettos to help those who live there achieve a decent life. However, he acknowledges that this is impossible for those without papers.

In 2021, then-prime minister Mario Draghi’s administration tried to change things. The government commissioned a map of all the informal settlements in Italy and allocated €200 million ($238 million) in European Union funds to provide housing for the residents. Borgo Mezzanone received €53 million ($63 million) and Torretta Antonacci received €28 million ($33.5 million). But only one study was commissioned, from the University of Bari, which proposed housing the immigrants in the outlying neighborhoods of the municipalities in the area — a proposal that was not well received and has since proven to be unfeasible. “The deadline for using the money is next August, and absolutely nothing has been done. That money has been lost,” Strippoli laments.

The community of Borgo Mezzanone hasn’t collapsed. It survives because several NGOs and the Catholic Church do what the Italian state fails to do: they provide residents with the rights that the state denies them, such as medical assistance (a mobile clinic has been run by the humanitarian organization INTERSOS since 2018), legal advice, Italian classes, showers and integration programs. The people who fight to change things put in long hours, with their phones constantly ringing. Some are very young, as there’s a generational shift happening within the NGOs.

Everyone familiar with immigration says the same thing: the only solution is to regularize the migrants’ status and grant them rights, thus ensuring that they pay taxes and contribute to Italian pensions. Mason, the immigration lawyer from ASGI, believes that there’s a logic “that exacerbates the controls, because the dominant narrative is that [these people] are dangerous.”

The government administration lacks sufficient resources, while business owners are frustrated with the bureaucracy. Every so often, the system simply collapses and there’s a mass regularization. The last one — involving 200,000 people — occurred in 2020.

Maria Palmieri is a photographer who has spent years documenting immigration in the area. She works with various NGOs and is currently the coordinator of the Spartacus project, promoted by several organizations. “It’s crucial to find a way to regularize [the status of] people who have lived here for so many years, without documents, abandoned in ghettos, unable to exercise their rights; it’s impossible to envision integration projects that allow for the mutual enrichment of communities without ensuring the necessary conditions.”

The Fatoma school — which opened in the village in 2023 — strives to achieve this integration by offering Italian classes. “Besides learning the language, the important thing is to create a community. Life in the ghetto isn’t easy. Here, they can build relationships, make friends,” say Maddalenna Fabbi and Martina Di Girolamo, both 28, who are among those in charge of the school.

To enter the informal settlement, there are constant warnings to be careful, especially because there have been bad experiences with some journalists. But once inside, the people are very kind.

Taking photos is difficult. One of the residents explains: “I don’t want my family to see that I live like this, and I don’t want people here to see it either, because then they call us filthy blacks. But we have to live like this — it’s not our fault that we’re poor.”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition