Italy and the Unspeakable Alternative: The Influence of Attitudes and Rhetoric on Immigration Involvement in Organized Crime

Abstract

Immigration and organized crime should not aim to correlate immigration and the act of committing a crime. Stereotyping to this level and not understanding limitations presented to immigrants, as well as the motivation or rationale behind criminal involvement by immigrants, is impractical and misleading. The focus of this paper is to establish the underlying driving forces that inadvertently influence immigrants to look towards organized crime as a means of survival. Immigration patterns and economic opportunities reveal the possibility of organized crime and an underground economy. Using Italy as a case study I seek to establish that the root of the problem of immigration and organized crime exists among the context of a failure to integrate resulting from isolation of ethnic groups. This divide forces immigrants to take advantage of the only alternate possibilities. This has been initiated deep in the infrastructure and rhetoric of politics, economics, and social drivers that have been created by the government and their ideological influence on the law making process and media representation of immigrants that leads to discriminatory sentiments and more segregation. In the end, the Mafia provides the sense of security and stability that immigrants were never allowed to gain from original circumstances.