Migration numbers are rising, the government is powerless: Meloni declares a refugee crisis

“The strong increase in migration flows in the current year has led to severe overcrowding in the first reception centers, especially in the hotspot of Lampedusa,” Giorgia Meloni’s government justified the declaration of a state of emergency.

In fact, the situation in the reception center on the small tourist island has not only been unsustainable since yesterday: some 2,000 boat people disembarked in Lampedusa on Easter Sunday and Easter Monday alone; On Tuesday, 1,659 migrants were still in the camp, with a capacity of 400, according to authorities. A total of 32,000 boat people have arrived in Italy since the beginning of January – three times more than in the same period last year.

“Emergency”: That sounds dramatic. And in fact it is a measure taken in Italy in the event of a major earthquake or, most recently, during the Covid pandemic with tens of thousands of deaths.

Despite the dramatic designation, it is primarily an administrative measure: thanks to the ‘migration emergency’ decided on Tuesday evening, bureaucratic hurdles in moving the refugees from Lampedusa to the mainland and in providing new housing must be avoided. For example, until now the government had to publicly announce every transport ship of migrants from Lampedusa – this nonsense is now coming to an end.

Major problems also in Sicily

The reception of the refugees now presents the government with almost insurmountable problems, and not only in Lampedusa. In Catania, Sicily, where many refugees from Lampedusa are being brought, the local civil defense is currently building a tent city. But not only in Sicily there is a shortage of accommodation. The goal of the Meloni government is for each of Italy’s twenty regions to have a large reception and removal center – so far only nine regions have such a structure.

The opposition accused the government of needless alarm: it was wrong to treat migration as a natural disaster or a pandemic by declaring a state of emergency. In fact, the right-wing government’s measure amounts to a recognition of its own powerlessness and helplessness: Giorgia Meloni, head of the post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia, finds no cure for the refugee flow.

During the election campaign, she promised to impose a naval blockade on the migrants’ boats. That had been an unrealistic promise from the start: the refugee boats cannot be intercepted like enemy warships, and to force the often barely seaworthy migrant boats to return would send the refugees to certain death.

The Crotone disaster is under investigation

The brutal reality of the dangerous crossings across the Mediterranean caught up with the Meloni government in late February, when more than 90 migrants drowned on a beach in Calabria after their boat crashed on a sandbank.

The photos of dozens of coffins in the Crotone gymnasium went around the world; the Italian authorities felt – whether rightly or wrongly an ongoing criminal investigation should reveal – with the accusation that the boat had not come to the rescue despite the storm and heavy seas. Since then, the Italian Coast Guard has continued to rescue thousands of migrants from distress at sea and bring them ashore, as they always have – the exact opposite of a naval blockade.

Given the objective impossibility of preventing refugee boats from landing, Meloni advocates concerted efforts in Brussels to prevent the boats from leaving their countries of origin, particularly in Tunisia. Ultimately, the Italian head of government has a billion-dollar deal in mind, similar to the deal the EU made with Turkey after the 2015 refugee crisis.

In Tunisia, the political situation is becoming increasingly unstable; If the government of Kais Saied falls, the Italian secret services fear a new exodus like in the days of the Arab Spring: Hundreds of thousands of young Tunisians could move to Italy and Europe. (aargauerzeitung.ch)