SAMUEL, from Ghana, lives hand to mouth and sleeps on a filthy mattress in an abandoned factory in Italy's southern agricultural region of Calabria, hardly his vision of the European El Dorado.

``I hoped that my life would be better here in Italy,'' said Samuel (not his real name), an illegal immigrant. ``Even at home, in Ghana, I would have never slept in such a place.''

This 25-year-old with a wispy beard and a lost look in his eyes is living the bitter downside of the dream of many Africans to find a better life in Europe.

While thousands of other immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa have drowned in the attempt to reach Europe's shores this year or been turned back on arrival, the former mechanic managed to get here safely and has a roof over his head and a job of sorts as a migrant farm worker.

But it is not much of a job, paying just US$40 on a good day, some days nothing at all. The lodgings are not ideal either, as he shares space with 70 other African immigrants.

Samuel's grim story is echoed across southern Italy, where thousands of clandestine workers eke out a meagre existence in squalid conditions. Rather than social welfare parasites as some European critics claim, the immigrants are becoming an indispensable, if unacknowledged cog in the region's farming system.

``There's an enormous collective hypocrisy when it comes to these people,'' says Andrea Accardi, who works on immigration issues in Italy for the French charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF).

``Everyone knows their fate, from the local communities, to the government, to the unions. But nobody acts because they're far too useful for farming.''

This was not the life Samuel dreamed about when he left his native Ghana in late 2005, like so many others sailing from Libya to the nearby southern Italian island of Lampedusa.

Samuel was held at a detention centre for a few days then shifted to another in southern Italy. Two months later he was released and ordered to leave Italian territory within five days meaning that his asylum request was rejected.

Instead, Samuel joined a friend near Naples and soon began working as a farm labourer.

Today, he tracks the regional harvest cycles, searching for work picking citrus fruit and olives in Calabria, winter strawberries in Naples, springtime apples in Sicily and summertime tomatoes in Puglia.

In Gioia Tauro, the routine is the same from November through January. Each dawn, scores of men and women from sub-Saharan and northern Africa and eastern Europe wait along the roadway, often for an hour or two. Farm vehicles turn up, scrutinising the day's choice. A nod means to jump in the truck to go work the field.

``There are good bosses. There are some in Puglia that pay up to +euro+30 a day. But it's very rare to find work every day,'' Samuel says. ``Other (bosses) are very bad. Sometimes they make us work all week before sending us away without pay.''

The exploitation of illegal workers here occasionally comes close to slavery such as at a work camp in Puglia dismantled by police last July, where some 100 illegal Poles laboured under the watch of armed guards and risked violent reprisals if they tried to escape.

Their plight sparked uproar in Italy and prompted the centre-left government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi to draft legislation last month that would give illegals temporary work papers if they could prove they were being exploited.

But many immigrants here have more basic complaints.

``We get water from people who are willing to give it to us,'' says Mohamed, 35, an illegal farm labourer from Morocco who also transited through Lampedusa. He now lives with 50 other workers in a damp and mouldy abandoned house with no privacy, no heat and lit only by flashlights.

``We don't have enough to eat, we lack blankets, clothes. We live like beggars,'' says Mohamed.

Many of the region's illegal farm workers also have difficulties accessing health care, says MSF, which estimates their numbers at 12,000. The organisation operates a year-round mobile clinic that follows the har