Make Capital Out of Their Sympathy: Rhetoric and Reality of U.S. Slavery and Italian Immigrant Prostitution along the Color Line from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first Century

Fear and racism welcome immigrants to Europe. Italy is no exception. Ignoring warnings that diminished immigration is a threat to the Italian economy, many natives view foreign-born residents as menacing safety, public order, culture, or national identity.1 From Milan to Palermo, immigrants are associated with the assaults, drunken driving, drug dealing, murder, and prostitution that make up between forty and sixty percent of all reporting on immigration. Such negative reports have spawned a “fear of being invaded.”2 Understandably, young people in the industrial north consider racism “cool,” and scarcely a day passes without television and newspaper accounts of aggression committed by or against immigrants.3