EXCLUSIVE: Migrant Homelessness In Gran Ghetto

MotM visits and captures rarely-seen ground
conditions at the notorious migrant ghetto in Foggia, Italy.

FOGGIA, ITALY 17 October 2019 – MotM Founder and Italy Correspondent, Pamela Kerpius visited Gran Ghetto in Foggia, Italy last week, one of the country’s most infamous shanty towns tied directly to the exploitation of migrant labor that sustains Italy’s agricultural economy. Gran Ghetto stands as an example of the continued precarious living conditions migrants often face even years after crossing the Mediterranean.

“Peter” (Sierra Leone; name changed for security) personally escorted Kerpius through Gran Ghetto’s mud and squalor for a rarely-seen look at life there on the ground. Peter has been in Italy for three years but is now staying in the ghetto since just last month, after being evicted from his state housing in Isernia, Italy due to a final-negative verdict on his asylum hearing.

With no other place to go, he followed the lead of a friend living in the ghetto and travelled to Foggia. Peter now works in the region’s agricultural fields and stays in a cramped mobile trailer container among four others. In total, he estimates more than 500 people currently inhabit the ghetto. Water supplies are scarce, there is no hot water to bathe, and no hygienic structures are available throughout.

Gran Ghetto is forgotten Italy. It is out of sight and therefore out of people’s minds, as it lies on a remote stretch of farmland removed from view of any local passersby, residents or tourists.

As Kerpius observed, “[Gran Ghetto] is all part of a migrant labor exploitation system that keeps these most vulnerable of people powerless and pinned to a field for scant wages when there is no other work available for them; and cramped in deplorable, unsanitary living conditions that are directly tied to Italy’s agricultural economy.”

Read Kerpius’s first hand account of her visit to Gran Ghetto and watch the rarely-seen photographic and video coverage of this infamous location live now on the site. And listen to Peter's Open Encounters podcast conversation.

###

About Migrants of the Mediterranean
Migrants of the Mediterranean is an online humanitarian storytelling publication that documents the journeys of the individual people who have crossed continents, countries, the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean Sea from their countries of origin to the Sicilian island of Lampedusa––the southernmost European land point from Africa in the Central Mediterranean.

The archive was developed to restore dignity to those who have had it stripped away during travel and trafficking, particularly across Libya where extraordinary human rights abuses, including slavery and torture, have been endured. It is also an account for the historical record. The journey story archive stands as a document from which we can index the realities of migration for some of the world’s most vulnerable at this pivotal time.

Migrants of the Mediterranean founding writer and Italy correspondent, Pamela Kerpius, personally greets arriving migrants in Lampedusa and in cities across the Italian peninsula for one-on-one interviews. Her storytelling continues across the mainland after people are transferred from Lampedusa, often the place of first reception, and documents issues of daily life and integration in Italy while individuals await asylum hearings and their subsequent results.