Migrants and why I fear for the land where I grew up

Yesterday the President of the european Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, praised the people of Italy for their ‘ heroic’ actions over the migrant crisis, promising ‘solidarity’ and declaring, with a hypocrisy spectacular even by his own standards: ‘Viva l’Italia!’

the country famously shaped like a boot could be forgiven for aiming its tip firmly in the direction of this gentleman’s nether regions. His, and all the other unelected eU officials who’ve turned a blind eye to a nation that, because of an accident of geography, is bearing the brunt of the influx of people from Libya and North africa.

this year alone, 84,000 have landed on Italian soil — up 20 per cent on last year. and it’s still only the beginning of July.

In reggio, 1,500 people arrived over the course of a single weekend — almost 1 per cent of that city’s population. things were so bad, the authorities were forced to put them up in the local a&e hospital.

Can you imagine if this were happening here? there would be outrage. It’s testament, then, to the infinite kindness of the Italian people. yet even their patience is limited. the Italian government has now declared that if something doesn’t change soon, they will be forced to close their ports and impound rescue vessels.

THIS is not a decision anyone would take lightly, but the Italians have no choice. For years, they’ve been asking for help from Brussels. and for years, their pleas have fallen on deaf ears.

yet one of the main justifications for the EU — bandied around at every turn by the remain camp during the referendum — is that it acts as a socio-economic unifier for the many disparate countries that fall under its umbrella. that its preservation is a vital safeguard against the divisions that tore europe apart in the 20th century.

Without it, we are endlessly told, europe would descend into chaos.

In fact, the opposite is true. It is precisely of the spectacular incompetence and PC-induced paralysis of Juncker and co. that Italy is now forced to face alone a humanitarian crisis of almost Biblical proportions.

Brussels has repeatedly failed to mobilise any sort of united search and rescue operation. It hasn’t even been able to stop member states such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech republic ( who are not exactly shy about enjoying their own rights to freedom of movement) from refusing point-blank to take a single migrant. Oh, all right, the Czech republic has taken 12. Out of more than half a million.

France and switzerland, too, have turned their faces away from their neighbour, closing their borders to migrants from Italy; and yesterday austria moved to do the same.

None of which is of any use to poor Italy. Nor will it help alleviate tensions on the ground there. Many in the already-impoverished south are becoming resentful of the newcomers — 70 per cent of whom, as the United Nations admitted this week, are not refugees, but economic migrants.

But Italy, where I spent much of my childhood, is no land of milk and honey today. Calabria, for example, a magnet for the peoplesmugglers, has the highest youth unemployment in europe, at 65 per cent. the one thing they really don’t need is even more young men hanging around street corners.

Little wonder that every Italian I talk to can speak of nothing else. they feel angry, frustrated, threatened. they see their culture being eroded, their country betrayed by the well-fed suits in Brussels.

dissatisfaction is spreading, dark forces are on the rise again. and for a country where the memory of Mussolini is never far beneath the surface, this is not a good omen.