In contemporary Italy, media and public actors frame the exploitation of migrant agricultural labourers as the outcome of caporalato. This concept – translated as labour brokerage or gang mastery – connotes the violent treatment of workers and their exploitation by powerful individuals, who are today increasingly racialised and understood as being Black and immigrants. However, our fieldwork in Apulia and Sicily uncovered a more complicated picture. This article considers a variety of sources to explore how caporalato is constructed and to what effect. Our argument is that, though rooted in real dynamics, caporalato is also a reductive, sensationalised, and racialising framing device that transposes historic tenets of Italy's ‘Southern Question’ onto ‘othered’ migrant workers. It affects policy by creating categories of people who are made ‘illegal’ and ‘deportable’. In also reinforcing derogatory stereotypes about the Italian South, it makes visible further South(s) of the Italian South(s) – offering insight into how and where borders are created and what their effects are.

In this article, we analyse the ideological content of the discursive strategies used by a group of migrant workers subjected to ‘caporalato’, a form of illegal hiring and exploitation of farm day workers through an intermediary. Starting from a series of collective open interviews with farm workers, we examine the way in which the dynamics of both exploitation and resistance are reproduced through linguistic and discursive practices. What emerges from the analysis is a complex set of ambivalent experiences and representations. Despite its inherent exploitative and controlling nature, the workers tend to justify, legitimise and deny the negative aspects of caporalato. Nonetheless, they also use linguistic devices of resistance to reconfigure the meanings of, and their role in, caporalato. Interestingly, the analyses show that caporalato is also perceived as a mechanism of social mobility. Only limited attempts at explicitly challenging its criminal nature are strategically expressed.