ABSTRACT
This is not a good time to be an immigrant in Italy. Immigrants are the first to pay the price of the economic crisis, told to stay home from their jobs randomly one day without bothering with any formal procedure. And even when they work, they earn on average one-third less than we Italians do. And then they are obsessed by the “permesso di soggiorno,” the document required to legally remain in Italy, which, even when all the papers are in order, takes such unforeseeable time to be obtained that it borders on the arbitrary—not to mention that, when the permit expires, the immigrants become clandestini, clandestine people, a condition that Italians have turned into with a felony, which turns immigrants into pariahs who can be blackmailed in any number of ways.
