Romanians Angered by Italian Allegations of Exporting 'Slaves'

Romanians expressed outrage on Thursday over a remark by Italy's right-wing interior minister, Matteo Salvini, in which he accused fellow European Union members Romania and Bulgaria of exporting "slaves" to Italy.

Salvini, who heads the anti-immigration League party in coalition with the populist Five Star Movement, made the comment to media on Wednesday after 12 Nigerian migrant workers without papers died in southern Italy when the overcrowded bus in which they were being illegally transported crashed.

Salvini, whose party was formerly called Northern League, was propelled to power by a radical right-wing message and a vow to deport half a million "illegal migrants".

He told reporters that Italy would respond to the "import of slaves from EU countries - Romania and Bulgaria."

"I will write to my colleagues in these countries, because they are part of the EU and they have a duty to check people and cars," he said.

The Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Thursday that the statement was "unacceptable".

"The situation of citizens who commit crimes needs to be approached without referring to stereotytpes, and in no way based on ethnicity or discrimination," the statement read.

The Romanian community in Italy, and some Romanian members of the European Parliament, also reacted with outrage.

"It's not the exploited who are to blame, so it's not the Romanians or the Bulgarians you should scold, but your co-nationals and their companies who prefer to hire Romanians and Bulgarians on the black market and pay lower wages than for Italian workers," Romanian Socialist MEP Ioan Mircea Pascu wrote on his official Facebook page.

An association of Romanian woman in Italy, ADRI, wrote an open letter to...