Italy’s Garment-Factory Slaves

Source: Women in the World
Date: August 21, 2013

Aside from the cobbled streets and terra cotta rooftops, the Via Pistoiese that dissects the Tuscan town of Prato outside Florence is not like other Italian streets. You won’t smell sautéed garlic here. Instead the pungent smell of peanut oil and dongpo pork permeates the air. The storefront signs are almost all in Chinese hanzi on vertical ribbons of red or blue with tiny Italian translations across the bottom. The grocery stores carry classic Chinese staples like rice and bamboo shoots instead of pasta and cans of tomatoes. The faces, too, are almost all Chinese. “There is absolutely no integration. They live in their part of town and we live in ours,” says lifelong Prato resident Giovanni Braccini, 73, who has watched the slow evolution of his city into what he describes as a foreign capital. “You aren’t in Italy here,” he says. “This is China now.”

Chinese immigration into Italy has tripled in the last decade, according to Italy’s official statistical agency Istat, which estimates that more than 210,000 Chinese live in Italy, although only 41,000 are legally registered. The number of Chinese-owned businesses has grown by 232 percent across the country since 2003, with the largest influx into Milan, Naples, and Prato. Many of the Chinese who live in Italy illegally came to the country by way of human traffickers, in what is reported to be a made-to-order market for garment workers who have specialized skills for the ready-to-wear market. Last week 75 people in France and Spain were arrested as part of an intricate human-trafficking ring that brings such workers to Italy.

Jan and his wife, Li, who did not want to give their real names because they are in Italy illegally, arrived in Rome last January by way of such traffickers. They paid $50,000 each for transport and documents, including fake transit papers that will likely keep them from being repatriated to China if they are arrested by Italian police. Li’s sister works in Prato in a silk-dying factory, and Li is planning to join her when the factory hires new workers for the fall production season. Li doesn’t speak Italian, but she won’t need it in Prato, her husband says. Jan, who learned basic Italian before coming to Italy, will work for his relatives in Rome who have a Chinese five-and-dime store until he has enough money to start his own enterprise, he says. “We also have an Italian dream,” he told The Daily Beast. “We will make back our investment to come here.”

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