Migrants sweep toward integration
ROME (Reuters) – Carefully sweeping dust and debris off a central Rome pavement and into a pan, Christian Okoro flashes a broad smile at a passerby who tosses him a coin.
“I am trying to integrate into your society by cleaning our streets,” reads a small cardboard sign he has placed next to a paper cup, hoping for donations from appreciative Romans.
Okoro, 27, from Ebony State in Nigeria, is one of a swelling number of immigrants who, rather than begging, are sweeping for loose change.
In Rome, where overflowing bins and rubbish strewn streets are a familiar sight, there is such a need.
Okoro arrived in Italy last June after paying smugglers 1,500 Libyan dinars ($1,073) for the risky passage in a rubber dinghy. His journey through the Niger desert, up through Libya and toward an eventual rescue at sea by emergency services is a grimly familiar story for the more than half a million people who have arrived on Italy’s shores since 2014.
In recent weeks, signs like Okoro’s have been cropping up all over the city, and he says he has recruited 20 other young men from the migrant camp he lives in at nearby Latina.
“People say ‘bravo,’ they say tell your people to come and do this,” said Okoro, who was a builder in his native Nigeria.
The sub-Saharan Africans and Bangladeshis who come to Italy can request permits to stay, but the process takes time and they struggle to find work in a country with one of the lowest employment rates in the European Union.
“People come to Rome... to see the architecture, so it needs to be clean,” Okoro said. “Thousands could not finish all the sweeping.”