Destabilising caporalato: existing scholarship and the Southern Question

This article builds on existing histories and ethnographies of caporalato and labour conditions for agricultural workers, which dispel myths and oversimplified portrayals of caporalato as the principal culprit for labour exploitation in Italy's agricultural sector. They evidence scholars’ discomfort with the reductive way this narration oversimplifies existing problems and risks sustaining unsuitable or discriminatory policymaking.

A complete historiography of the concept of caporalato in Italy is beyond the scope of this paper; however, Perrotta's (Reference Perrotta2014) historical account of caporalato provides a thorough overview of the role of the caporale across transformations in agriculture, politics, and economic structures from the second half of the 1800s to the present day. Despite localising the birth of the figure known as caporale in nineteenth-century Apulia, as a response to the demand for farmhands in the wake of the intensification of viticulture and grain crops, Perrotta analyses instances of caporalato up and down the Italian peninsula. He also traces the development of Italian legislation around caporalato, in each instance providing background that shows how criminalising caporalato was tied to other government interests, namely, efforts to weaken trade unions. Perrotta thus surfaces the construction of this figure and its vilification. He overturns common assumptions: that it is necessarily found in the South, or that the caporale is necessarily a mafioso. Indeed, at times, caporali were both mafiosi and labour activists. By providing this history, Perrotta also sheds light on the fact that, increasingly, caporalato is associated with immigrants, though a version of the caporale figure predates this contemporary context.

Other scholars have used ethnographic means to complicate and deconstruct reductive representations of caporalato. Some present caporali as occasionally violent and exploitative middlemen. Still, they argue that these individuals should be considered a node – and perhaps inevitable consequence – of a broader system in which state policy has failed to rein in the corporate players in global value chains who set prices and labour standards. For example, Lo Cascio and Perrotta (Reference Lo Cascio and Perrotta2019, 3), writing about camps in Sicily and Basilicata, argue that part of the reason that ‘migrant workers perceive their ghettoization, discrimination and exploitation as “normal” and “acceptable”’ is because caporali build ‘communitarian relationships’ that serve to make invisible, to the workers, broader ‘structural violence’. Criminalising caporalato thus acts as a ‘lightning rod’ (Caruso Reference Caruso2022, 45), diverting criticism that might otherwise be leveraged towards the state or other actors in the supply chains. Similarly, Perrotta and Raeymaekers (Reference Perrotta and Raeymaekers2022) argue that we should pay attention to the caporale figure, but mostly insofar as it points to a larger system of labour exploitation that includes the increasing ‘refugeeization’ of southern Italy's agricultural workforce (Rigo and Dines Reference Rigo, Dines and Ponzanes2015). Here, the caporale still emerges as a fundamental figure that ‘recruit(s) and discipline(s) mobile workers’ (Perrotta and Raeymakers Reference Perrotta and Raeymaekers2022, 9). However, they argue that it is part of the ‘migrant labour infrastructures’ that ‘complement neoliberal state policies’ while ‘externalising the cost of labour reproduction to informal workers who are increasingly caught in the web of illegality’ (Reference Perrotta and Raeymaekers2022, 2).

Finally, some research has focused on quelling the idea that the figure called caporale is always violent or exploitative, through ethnographic research investigating the point of view of farmhands. Howard and Forin (Reference Howard and Forin2019, 590), writing about the large camp (Gran Ghetto) in Foggia, Apulia, argue that caporali, though ‘much maligned … play a fundamental intermediary role’. Further, none of the workers they interviewed ‘considered himself a modern slave’, and all ‘point to their circumstances (rather than any individual) as the primary coercive force they face’ (Reference Howard and Forin2019, 588). Crucially, they write, ‘physical coercion is simply unnecessary: “dull compulsion” alone is enough to maintain labour discipline, because every migrant there needs work, many are without papers, and in a context of crisis and social marginalisation, few have better alternatives’ (Howard and Forin Reference Howard and Forin2019, 591). Still other work has argued that the caporale figure is not exclusive or endemic to southern Italy, or even to Italy in general – but rather resembles labour brokers in the US, UK, and throughout the rest of Europe (Perrotta Reference Perrotta2014). Indeed, this is a point that is growing in recognition (e.g. Papa Reference Papa2021), such as through coverage of caporalato in places like Saluzzo, in the north-eastern region of Piedmont (Brovia and Piro Reference Brovia, Piro, Rye and O'Reilly2020; Borratto Reference Borrato2019; Uleri et al. Reference Uleri, Zadra, Piccoli, Sandoval and Elsen2023).

Together, this literature shows how many popular imaginings of caporalato do not accurately describe the complexity of what occurs on the ground. And yet, in mainstream media, as well as in interviews, we found recurring ideas about caporalato that pervaded (cf. Rigo and Dines Reference Rigo, Dines and Ponzanes2015; Erta Reference Erta2014; Howard and Forin Reference Howard and Forin2019). As stated, our goal is not to produce a scientific or quantifiable definition that would simply add to the long list of existing definitions of caporalato. Rather, we focus here on deconstructing popular conceptualisations of caporalato that dominate public imagination by showing how, while various and varying, they are commonly built on the historic Southern Question. This Question has been studied, defined, and redefined in ways too numerous to discuss in full; we thus provide a brief overview, focusing on how representations of the Italian South – be they positive or negative, created by insider southerners or outsider Italians or northerners – have drawn a dividing line between the imagined ‘North’ and ‘South’ of the country.

In his recent brief history of the Southern Question, Pescosolido (Reference Pescosolido2017) argues that it was a product of the Unification of Italy because it was in unifying that a ‘North’ became defined as different to a ‘South’. His reasoning substantiates Giglioli's (Reference Giglioli2017) argument that the ‘incorporation of “difference” (from internal peripheries and colonies) accompanied the creation and consolidation of many European nation-states’ (409). Indeed, Pescosolido notes that the South ‘presented, vis-à-vis the Centre-north, a weaker economic development, less mature progress in terms of social relations, and a lower level of important aspects of civic life’ (22, our translation). It thus became a ‘problem’ for the new Italian nation-state to confront.

While Pescosolido focuses on the historiography of the ‘Question’ and how it relates to the need to ‘develop’ (in his terms, to improve the living conditions of) the South, others have addressed how such differences have also been entwined with various representations of the South as underdeveloped and thus ‘backward’, or a ‘problem’. Davis (Reference Davis and Levy1996) summarised the Southern Question as the ‘well-worn stereotypes that equate the South with forms of social and economic backwardness, delinquency, organised crime, and political corruption’. Crucially, debates involved the idea of northern hegemony over the South, based on the ‘presumed racial alterity of southerners’ and the ‘geographical designation of the South as a strip of African territory’ (Derobertis Reference Derobertis, Lombardi-Diop and Romeo2012, 159). Some scholars have argued that this was crucial to Italy's nation-building project: it needed to project an aura of ‘Europeanness’ and thus displaced pre-existing ideas about its ‘Southernness’, ‘Mediterraneanness’, or ‘Africanness’ onto the geographic, but in many ways imagined, ‘South’ (Dickie Reference Dickie, Lumley and Morris1997; Fogu Reference Fogu2020)

Pescosolido (Reference Pescosolido2017) observes that representations of the South are not solely negative (23). Indeed, the South has been imagined in a variety of ways beyond those outlined by Davis: for example, as a place of authentic or pre-modern (thus ‘pristine’) social relations or as a place where it is possible to encounter, if in ruined form, the material culture of Classical Antiquity (see, e.g. Moe Reference Moe2002). Thinkers and activists have also used the ‘Mediterranean’, ‘Southern’ or subaltern characterising of the ‘South’ to explore alternatives to forms of political hegemony (e.g. Cassano Reference Cassano1996).

While some of these descriptions of the Italian South could be understood as ‘positive’, we are interested ultimately in the demarcation of the South as different to the North, and how this difference has often been ascribed to normative and moralised qualities. Indeed, some of these more ‘positive’ portrayals amount to a form of Orientalism, as Schneider (Reference Schneider1998) argues, and can still serve to ‘other’ southerners. Similarly, while many southerners have engaged in debates about the South, evidencing that the Southern Question was not solely created by northerners as a strategy for governing or state building, many of their contributions indicate a struggle to reckon with the terms of the debate, including the very differentiation of a North from a South (see, e.g. Fortunato Reference Fortunato1904; Salvemini Reference Salvemini1900). What emerges from this necessarily brief overview is that, while we can clearly see the creation of a kind of border between ‘North’ and ‘South’ (in quotes to designate imagined or created geographies within Italy), there are, in fact, many ‘Souths’ (cf. Donzelli Reference Donzelli1990). In this paper, we seek to multiply this binary further without negating that the binary – however contested in scholarly literature – continues to hold firm in popular imaginations in and of Italy.

Using these as our starting points, we now offer further analysis that examines how the ‘processes of internal socio-spatial differentiation’ (Giglioli Reference Giglioli2017, 409) involved in the Southern Question are currently used in the production of popular imaginings of caporalato. Often, we found that caporalato was more broadly spoken of as a ‘Southern phenomenon’, without interlocutors exploring much of the nuance about the meaning of the concept ‘South’ that we have sought to provide. Rather, ‘South’ or ‘southern’ served as a stand-in for certain characteristics. We thus focus on some elements of the Southern Question over others – namely the supposed backwardness, underdevelopment, pre-modernity, Africanness, and criminality of the Italian South – because these are the stereotypes that reappear in current framings of caporalato. Through both continuity and the addition of new, if related, stereotypes, such narratives exacerbate existing tropes about the South to promote the idea that caporalato is the primary source of worker exploitation.

Continuity and rupture: Past and present caporalato violence and the Italian South

In 2006, Fabrizio Gatti's investigative piece Io Schiavo in Puglia, (‘I, a Slave in Apulia’) sounded national alarm bells on the emergence of a ‘new caporalato’ in Italy. He focused his work on the southern Italian province of Foggia in Apulia – one of Italy's most important agricultural areas, known for its significant contribution to the country's tomato output (Bagnardi, D'Onofrio and Greco Reference Bagnardi, D'Onofrio and Greco2020; Howard and Forin Reference Howard and Forin2019). Gatti provides vivid descriptions of appalling living and working conditions:

Through such visceral descriptions, Gatti exposed the dark underbelly of the Italian agricultural sector, creating what a former regional administrator described as a ‘casino mondiale’ (worldwide mess) as both national and regional officials scrambled to counter the image of (southern) Italy as a haven for enslavers and human traffickers. Beyond the immediate consequences of this public relations nightmare, Gatti's piece can be considered a cultural touchstone central to heralding a contemporary understanding of a ‘new’ caporalato, which, over time, has been espoused by much of the Italian media and some activists, NGOs, and policymakers concerned with labour exploitation in agriculture (Perrotta Reference Perrotta2014; Rigo and Dines Reference Rigo, Dines and Ponzanes2015; Dines Reference Dines2018). This understanding is both in continuity with, and extends in new ways, the imaginary of the Southern Question. Dickie (Reference Dickie, Lumley and Morris1997) argued that Italy offloaded its ‘otherness’ onto its southern half as a means of state-building and creating a European Italy (Fogu Reference Fogu2020). Here, the symbolic attachment of caporalato to the southern half of the peninsula might well serve a similar salvific role for the country as a whole – particularly for its Made in Italy branding (Howard and Forin Reference Howard and Forin2019).

‘New’ caporalato is represented as the latest link in southern Italy's supposed long chain of violence and underdevelopment. At the same time, the contemporary context is seen as an extreme outbidding of these previous forms of violence and criminality – rendered as such by the now physical presence of Africans on Italian soil, whereas before southern Italians were simply depicted as Africans (or other non-European peoples, including ‘Arabs’, ‘Turks’ or ‘Mediterraneans’). The figure of the caporale is portrayed as being in continuity with a southern past and emanating from a southern geography. In addition, due to his physical, racial, and legal foreignness, the contemporary caporale is also often framed as an enslaver, an exacerbation of depictions of previous generations of Italian caporali built on a new set of racial stereotypes.

Headlines of mainstream newspapers like the Corriere della Sera illustrate how caporalato is depicted as a phenomenon that is endemic to an ‘underdeveloped’ South. In 2019, the headline for a CorriereTV special on caporalato read, ‘“The Story of a Tomato”, mafia and caporali: the illegal supply chain of the product that is a symbol of our agriculture’. The subtitle read:

The implicit argument is that the South is a place that is ‘lagging’, and has thus long been fertile for such ‘backward’, violent phenomena.

These headlines continue despite a growing awareness that caporalato exists throughout Italy (Papa Reference Papa2021; Carchedi and Bilongo Reference Carchedi and Bilongo2020). The case of Saluzzo, for example, has been explored both in the press (Cravero Reference Cravero2020, Reference Cravero2022; L'Espresso 2023) and in academia (Brovia and Piro Reference Brovia, Piro, Rye and O'Reilly2020; Uleri et al. Reference Uleri, Zadra, Piccoli, Sandoval and Elsen2023). It was also frequently brought up by interlocutors who disputed the notion of caporalato as a southern phenomenon.Footnote ² As Franco, a migration rights activist and writer currently collaborating with a migrant-aid NGO, put it: ‘The difference between North and South is contextual. […] [T]he background changes but [not] the principal aspect, which sees this phenomenon reproduced all over the Italian territory’ (Interview with Franco, September 2021). Still, the assumption remains that the phenomenon is rooted in the South. Take, for instance, a 2023 article in La Repubblica: on the one hand, it openly criticised the ‘discriminatory tale’ of caporalato as ‘typically meridionale’. The headline of the article, however, plainly reasserted a sense of South-to-North contagion by stating, ‘caporalato conquers the North’ (La Repubblica 2023). Often accompanying these discussions is an implication that, though caporalato is present in the North, it can be less extreme, more subtle, and ‘sophisticated’ (La Repubblica 2023).

If caporalato is depicted explicitly as a typically southern phenomenon and a problem of development, it is also often couched in sensationalised language that exacerbates the existing aura of southern ‘backwardness’, and leans towards emphasising violence, as was illustrated in Gatti's piece. As Giorgio, one seasoned journalist whom we interviewed, put it: in press coverage, articles focusing on braccianti garner the most attention – but also, arguably, the most clicks and revenue – when they emulate the shock-value of cronaca nera (true crime news). Indeed, headlines and social media posts, as well as articles, frequently couple discussions of braccianti's deaths with other physical manifestations of their conditions: back-breaking labour in the fields, the schifo [disgust] of the ghetto, and the brutality done to migrants’ bodies. For example: ‘Sick at work, a desperate run from Foggia to Bari, dead at 27: “now he can go home to mom”’ (FoggiaToday 2023); ‘The Gran Ghetto of Rignano: trip to the no-man's-land where politics has lost face, between pyres, deaths and exploitation’ (Gaita Reference Gaita2017); or medical NGO CUAM's statement, quoted in La Repubblica, that ‘agriculture in Italy counts the dead like on a battlefield’ (Nadotti Reference Nadotti2019). The environment is clearly that of the Italian South – yet exacerbated. To quote Giorgio again: ‘The imagery that has been created around [caporalato] has become [an] easy one to photograph and to construct [here meaning to market/to make a story for publication] […] the Black slave, bent over in the fields, with the caporale standing up’ (Interview with Giorgio, August 2021).

Unlike their Italian predecessors, new braccianti are not merely understood as abused but as slaves, again, as in Gatti's piece. ‘This is how slaves die in our agriculture’ reads another headline from Italy's daily, La Repubblica (Bonini Reference Bonini2021). While some argue that such language is crucial for calling attention to a vital issue of life and death, as noted by Rigo and Dines (Reference Rigo, Dines and Ponzanes2015), the portrayal of migrant labourers as slaves does not merely curtail their agency but also deprives them of the positive framings commonly associated with the South's agrarian tradition, namely ‘the tradition of rebellion’ and ‘simplicity of lifestyles’ (Reference Rigo, Dines and Ponzanes2015, 8).

Such notions of caporalato as a violent excess and a form of slavery also generate and are generated by the everyday activities of many NGOs and trade unions, albeit in uneven ways. For example, the Osservatorio Placido Rizzotto's Agromafie e Caporalato report offered a lucid and multi-faceted look at the current realities faced by migrant labourers in agriculture. But it also provides an illustration of language related to modern slavery:

This was the only explicit use of modern slavery terminology in the 400 pages of the report, highlighting how this polarising representation can coexist with a more nuanced understanding. Indeed, for all its nuance, the report continues to use a title – Agromafie e Caporalato – which implicitly validates the automatic connection between caporalato and the mafia. This apparent duality elicits an important question: if so many activists, trade unionists, and even policymakers know better, why are such representations so prevalent? In practice, many of our interlocutors appeared aware of the reductive nature of this portrayal but operated in settings where this framing seemed unavoidable. To give a salient example, we witnessed two union representatives, engaged in a nuanced conversation about the lived reality of the ghetti and the narrow-mindedness of repressive approaches, standing only steps away from the van they had arrived in, on which was plastered an anti-caporalato slogan.

In our research, as in the literature, there is a clear limit to the extent to which workers conceptualise themselves as slaves or point to caporalato as their biggest source of exploitation (Dines Reference Dines2018; Howard and Forin Reference Howard and Forin2019). Workers in both Apulia and Sicily pointed instead to pay, or not having the proper documents, or something else, as the main issue. Many workers we encountered voiced frustrations over organisations and journalists who came to take pictures of people and post them on Facebook with indignant captions. They were thus aware that caporalato had become a hot-button issue and that they rarely reaped the material benefits of this increased attention, which some perceived to be lining the pockets of NGOs and journalists alike. In the words of one particularly frustrated labourer: ‘They are eating [profiting, earning] on us’. In a conversation with one older Senegalese worker in Sicily, he admitted the living circumstances were a ‘disaster’ but called the agricultural work he did ‘dignified’. Similar conversations in Apulia often had workers emphasising their own ability to choose exploitative working conditions. One worker, a young Malian who had worked multiple seasons in Foggia, stated ‘the caporale does not force you to get in his car’. Similarly, a Guinean migrant about to start his second summer in Foggia, directly challenged the term ‘slave’, noting that ‘I know my conditions better than anyone. I know how hard it is.’

As these comments imply, the framing of agricultural work by Black men as ‘slavery’ is not only inaccurate, but it also constructs a world in which Black workers cannot exist as workers. This construction draws on very real historical categories associated with Black workers, the enslaved people of the American South, and brings these categories to the contemporary Italian South. It amounts to a denigrating gesture that does not account for choice, subjecthood, or constraining circumstances that affect all workers. This extends the Southern Question and builds on its stereotypes in new ways because of the presence of Black and ‘foreign’ bodies in Italy. It suggests a more savage, more exploitative, more ‘other’ South, but anchored geographically within the existing Italian South where such potential always lay. Indeed, these two ‘Souths’ are intimately connected.

Caporali as mafiosi: Law 119 and the criminalisation of middlemen

As well as being described as enslavers, caporali are also routinely associated with Italian organised crime. This narration connects them to a ‘quintessentially’ southern cultural problematic and leverages further concerns of underdevelopment, degeneracy, and pathological criminality. Ultimately, the twin designations of enslaver and mafioso come to shape the caporale as a sort of ‘folk devil’ (Howard and Forin Reference Howard and Forin2019), an othered figure that illustrates the existence of ‘South(s) of the South(s)’.

According to one anti-caporalato activist, this twin designation is partly created by a ‘false media narrative’. The death or exploitation of braccianti is often directly connected to the cruel and sprawling influence of the mafia through the vehicle of caporalato. For example, in an article entitled ‘The Innocents Killed by the Mafia Who Wanted to Live’, a local Foggia newspaper featured the much-publicised demise of twelve braccianti in a traffic accident alongside an entire family slaughtered in a clan feud, gunned-down policemen, and entrepreneurs who had refused to pay the pizzo. As in other cases we have seen, the article featured an almost gory description, in cronaca nera style:

Media and activism feed off each other in this mafia-isation of caporalato: the article also discussed how the prominent anti-Mafia organisation Libera listed the names of the deceased braccianti who had perished in the accident in its annual list memorialising victims of the Mafia. The point here is not that caporalato and mafia activity are never related – in fact, we witnessed first-hand during fieldwork how mafiosi used the vulnerable status of agricultural workers to carry out their dirty work and criminal activities. However, in sensationalised, media articles the link is often overstated and underqualified, leading a reader to assume that caporalato is not just mafia but Mafia – as in, belongs through affiliation to a known organised crime group. This reinforces the idea that worker exploitation is endemic to southern Italy – the land of Mafia and caporalato.

But this elision is not limited to newspaper headlines – it also crops up in everyday aid work as well as bordering tactics. A spokesperson for the Apulia region was explicit about drawing the connection between anti-caporalato work and anti-Mafia operations: ‘We [regional policymakers] say beauty, legality, Antimafia sociale … and in this, there is also the fight against caporalato’ (Interview with Martino, September 2021). The reference to anti-Mafia illustrates a blurring between the ‘criminality’ of being undocumented workers and that of being associated with mafia/Mafia activity.

Connecting caporalato to mafia is not anodyne. It ties the figure of the caporale to a particular kind of villain – a primarily southern criminal. This connection, we argue, between the Black caporale and the mafioso provides a logic that reappears in certain kinds of legislation that criminalise caporali, purportedly to ‘fix’ the broader issue of worker exploitation, such as Law 199, commonly referred to as the ‘Law against caporalato’. Crucially, the law sought to open the way for the prosecution of Italian landowners but, by the admission of the law's own supporters, progress on this front has been limited, with much of the risk and consequences still falling upon the (non-Italian, often non-white) intermediaries (Carchedi and Bilongo Reference Carchedi and Bilongo2020, 143). The law is generally understood to have resulted from the bubbling over of public outrage following the highly mediatised 2015 death of one of the rare remaining Italian braccianti, 49-year-old Paola Clemente.

Anti-Mafia sensibilities are highly present in the text of the legislation, which, as we were told by actors involved in its crafting, was also in part inspired by efforts to economically cripple the Mafia. As highlighted by journalist and long-time anti-caporalato activist Antonio:

Of course, not all agreed with Antonio's view. Some of our interviewees repeated the popular, at times folk-wisdom-like, idea that the Mafia wants nothing to do with agricultural labour simply because there isn't enough money involved. Some, on the other side of the spectrum, argued that there was no way that Mafias weren't involved at some point in the supply chain – whether in control of large horticultural markets, transporting products for transformation, or participating in forms of racketeering. As one activist, Carlo, put it, ‘the links with caporalato are not evident … they're not known or proven, but it is difficult to imagine that a criminal phenomenon like caporalato developed in this land without the clan taking any interest’ (August 2021 interview).

Nonetheless, our ultimate point is not that the Mafia is not sometimes or in some way involved, but rather that the complex system – with political, economic, social, and other facets – of worker exploitation is often reduced to this simple concept of caporalato. This gesture obfuscates other important dynamics. It is also revealing. As we've shown, this discourse is constructed by association to tenets of the Southern Question – be they the South's underdevelopment and otherness, the endemic nature of violence in its lands, or the historic power of the Mafia – exacerbated by the presence of ‘foreigners’ who are also ‘enslavers’.

Crucially, we do not claim to be able to demonstrate a direct causal link between the echoes of the ‘Southern Question’ in the construction of popular imagination around caporalato and the creation of Italian laws like Law 199. Rather, as Erta (Reference Erta2014) also points out, media provide a key node between people and politics. The ways in which people are represented in the media and in popular culture more broadly helps legitimise government actions towards those people in the eyes of a state's citizenry. To provide a specific example, one former policymaker (who asked to remain anonymous) noted, in reference to Gatti's coverage of caporalato in Apulia (Gatti Reference Gatti2006), that the resulting outrage about the conditions of foreign workers created the ‘right political conditions’ for legislative interventions at the regional level, in a similar fashion to Clemente's death and Law 199 years later.

More generally, as we know from Said (Reference Said1973) and others, representation is linked to power hierarchies and governance writ broadly. The differentiation of space and of people created by ‘othering’ mechanisms can be said to provide the necessary foundations for bordering. ‘Othered’ individuals thus become ‘deportable’ or criminalisable (De Genova Reference De Genova2002). It is interesting to analyse Law 199 through this lens, because rather than seeking to tackle the broader system that results in worker exploitation, Law 199 targets individuals who belong to this rather vague, difficult-to-define, and highly stereotyped category known as ‘caporali’. This is an example of what we mean when we say that such representation has bordering effects.

To understand these bordering effects, it is helpful to compare Law 199 with ongoing efforts to criminalise boat-drivers crossing the Mediterranean. On the one hand, both illustrate how governments criminalise Black or immigrant figures to ‘fix’ a broader situation that has become highly mediatised and politicised. Boat-drivers are framed as traffickers partly to have a scapegoat for the tragedies of death and violence that occur regularly in the Mediterranean (Borderline Sicilia 2021). Similar, if slightly different, efforts to criminalise caporalato have targeted a single, usually immigrant or Black man in a supposed strategy to end the widespread tragedy of worker exploitation, or, indeed, enslavement.

Second, as the interview with Antonio above indicates, criminalisation of both boat-drivers and of caporalato relies on the aura of anti-Mafia activism and legislative precedence. The criminalisation of boat-drivers, for instance, was instigated by prosecutors (Pubblico Ministero or PM for short) in Sicily before being taken up as a political strategy by the likes of Salvini's far-right Lega party. The PM position has historically been seen as the seat from which anti-Mafia justice is carried out. The crime of the boat-drivers, then, was depicted not just as being the deliberate violation of Italy and Europe's borders, but, apparently, also their involvement in Mafia-led human trafficking rings (Campbell and Agostino Reference Campbell and Agostino2021; Hintjens Reference Hintjens2019). As with the association of caporalato to mafia, it becomes confusing and impossible to discern whether media, PMs, and policymakers are necessarily referring to concrete proof of collaboration with an actual Mafia, or whether these middlemen broker activities are seen as proof of mafiosità – an altogether vaguer concept, for which it is not clear what proof is needed to be found guilty of an actual crime. The association is useful, though, as it permits the use of the (originally exceptional) logics and tools of anti-Mafia legislation to seep into other policing spheres. This includes, for instance, the ability to ‘wiretap anyone suspected of having connections to organised crime’ (Taub Reference Taub2017). Caporalato, like immigration more broadly, becomes tied to the Mafia. This permits a whole other dimension and type of legislation to emerge. In this case, directed especially at Black and immigrant men, these otherwise exceptional tools become part of the security and bordering apparatus of the Italian state.