Italy overwhelmed by refugees

Considering closing ports, asking other nations to help shoulder burden

MORE than 12 000 immigrants have been rescued in the Mediterranean in the past four days, a spike that has overwhelmed Italian policy-makers, who are threatening to partly bar ports to rescue ships.

The drastic step would, in theory, force ships bearing people fleeing wars and economic deprivation to find other places to dock, shifting some of the burden of Europe’s grinding migration crisis to France and Spain. Both are on the Mediterranean Sea, but they are far more distant from Libya, through which nearly all the migrants are passing.

The proposal probably is a bargaining position taken ahead of a meeting of European migration ministers next week to discuss the continent’s challenges.

But it is also a reflection of Italy’s years on the migration front lines with little help from the rest of Europe. More than 82 000 people have arrived in Italy this year, a 20% increase over the same period last year, according to the UN refugee agency. Migrant flows into Greece from Turkey have mostly dried up, meanwhile, a result of a March 2016 deal with Ankara to halt the traffic.

“With this frequency and these numbers we can easily tell that, soon enough, we won’t be able to handle it any longer,” said Nicola Latorre, the chairman of the defence committee of the Italian Senate. “We need to act now, and what can immediately be done is to allow vessels that are not flying the Italian flag to carry those migrants to their respective countries.

“We risk reaching a point when we won’t be able to authorise any landing any longer, a dramatic situation,” he said.

Under EU rules, asylum seekers are supposed to apply for protection in the first EU country that they enter. At the height of the migration crisis in late 2015, EU leaders set up a quota system to try to distribute migrants from the main arrival nations of Greece and Italy, but it has barely gott off the ground.

The influx has strained Italian infrastructure – and the goodwill of Italian voters. Citizens, once relatively friendly to migrants, rejected many politicians seen as soft on immigration in local elections. Anti-immigration hard-liners were much more successful, putting pressure on the country’s ruling centre-left Democratic Party to be seen to ease the crisis.

“The message is that of a country that is not breaking the rules, but is coming under pressure and is asking for a concrete contribution from its European counterparts,” Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni said on Thursday alongside other European leaders in Berlin as they prepared for the Group of 20 summit of world powers next week.

“The migrant influx is not stopping. Unless you help us, the danger is that the populists will win the next general election in Italy.”italy and Greece “cannot be left alone in this refugee crisis”, European Commission president said Jean-claude Juncker on Friday.

Commission officials have been sympathetic to Italy’s request that other nations accept rescue boats, though it is unclear whether Italy could bar its own ports legally or practically. – The Washington Post