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Italy, naval blockade against Mediterranean migrants

2022-10-26 09:01:02Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX

Italy, naval blockade against Mediterranean migrants

In the election campaign, the new prime minister Giorgia Meloni, who comes from the extreme right sceptre, promised to more or less stop the migration flows coming to Italy from North Africa by sea. "We propose the creation of a naval blockade, because as we have explained thousands of times, we are dealing with a joint European mission with the states of North Africa, to jointly stop the trade in white meat and to create on African territory centers to be put under joint administration. There, the asylum requests in the EU should be checked and the decision should be made on who needs international help and who doesn't", said Giorgia Meloni in a video of her party, the Brothers of Italy.

It is not clear what is meant by a naval blockade, thinks migration researcher Christopher Hein, who teaches at LUISS University in Rome. "This language is clear evidence of the direction that migration and asylum policy is expected to take," Christopher Hein told the specialized magazine Migazin. 

The director of the European Refugee Council (ECRE), Catherine Woollard, also listens to the statement of the new Italian prime minister with skepticism. "A complete ban on migration is neither possible nor in Italy's interest. We can expect measures to be taken and controversial activities to be organized. There have been signals that they will once again focus on the arrival of rescue ships, i Catherine Woollard told Deutsche Welles in Brussels.

Closing ports is not migration policy 

In 2018 and 2019, former interior minister Matteo Salvini of the right-wing populist Lega party temporarily closed Italy's ports to rescue ships carrying migrants who had sunk at sea. 

Salvini's League is now part of Rome's far-right coalition government. However, Giorgia Meloni did not give Salvini the post he wanted to return to the head of the interior ministry. He was served by being given the post of Minister of Transport.

The new interior minister, who is responsible for migration, is a close friend of Salvini. Matteo Piantedosi has so far not expressed as radical a view as Salvini, but the direction that the migration policy will take was given by his boss during the electoral campaign: "In Italy we want to apply the simple principle that in this country we can to enter only by legal means. Migration flows in our country should not be directed by smugglers or worse, by those who want to destabilize our nation and Europe." Only eight percent of migrants, Meloni claims in her video, have the right to asylum.The rest are young men who want to work in Italy.

The new government in Italy will have to quickly face the reality of migration, thinks the migration expert of the Greens in the European Parliament, MP Erik Marquardt. Criminalizing rescue operations at sea and closing the ports will not bring much benefit to Giorgia Meloni, says Erik Marquardt: "I think she will see very quickly that 90 percent of the people who come to Italy, come without any help from rescue ships at sea. This means that sea rescue is not a condition for anyone to come to Italy, the condition is that the more of them gather in Libya, the more they come to Italy."

"Italy benefits from migrants"

In addition, argues the Green MEP, Italy also benefits from migration. "Many sectors, such as agriculture in Italy, function only because people work there who enter the country even irregularly, some of them even work in inhumane conditions. Therefore, I think that certain claims can be made in public, but when when it comes to the practice of governance, it will be understood without wasting time that the populism of the election campaign does not contribute to Italy doing better."

Most of the 65,000 people who have arrived in Italy this year by sea will not end up in the Italian asylum system, but will go further north. This phenomenon of continued migration to another country is also related to other migration flows through Greece or the Balkans.

This is the only way to explain why the majority of asylum requests in the EU are not made in the Mediterranean countries of Italy or Greece, but in Germany.

European migration policy will not get any simpler

At the European level, the EU Commission and the member countries, like the new prime minister of Italy, demand greater protection of the external borders, which means raising barriers to illegal entry. Even the idea of ​​processing asylum requests in camps of any kind set up outside the EU has many supporters. It's just that their implementation in practice has not been done so far. Even the distribution of asylum seekers from Italy or Greece to other member countries has so far failed due to the opposition made by Poland, Hungary and other countries.

It is precisely with the right-wing national governments of Poland and Hungary that the right-wing government of Italy wants to cooperate more. How this will affect migration policy is hard to predict. "It is not possible to predict what effect it will have at the European level. It depends on several factors, which we do not know yet," Woollard, Director of the European Refugee Council, told Deutsche Welles. She thinks that hit hard by the economic crisis, Italy will be willing to make compromises on migration and refugee policy in order to secure money from the EU again, among others from the recovery money given to Corona.

New European mission in the Mediterranean?

But the cooperation will not be as simple as with the previous governments, thinks the green European deputy, Marquardt. "The thing with Italy is that it will certainly no longer be a very constructive partner. This is an obstacle to the sharing of responsibilities in Europe, which is what we need in the European Union."

In her government statement, Georgia Meloni announced on Tuesday (25.10) that instead of a naval blockade, Italy could also revive the "Mission Sofia" to monitor the Mediterranean from European Union naval units. Meloni said she will speak for this in the EU. In 2019, "Mission Sofia" was closed by Italy, because other EU countries did not want to feel obliged to take the people rescued from "Sofia" and distribute them across the EU./DW


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