Italy might bar some ports to migrant rescue ships
Move could shift more of European migration crisis to other nations.
BRUSSELS— More than 12,000 migrants have been rescued in the blue seas of the Mediterranean in the last four days, a spike that has some overwhelmed Italian policymakers threatening to partly bar their ports to rescue ships.
The step would in theory force ships bearing people fleeing war and economic deprivation to find other places to dock, shifting some of the burden of Europe’s grinding migration crisis to nations such as France and Spain.
Both nations are on the Mediterranean Sea, but they are far more distant from Libya, through which nearly all the migrants are passing.
The proposal is likely 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 percent increase over the same period last year, according to the United Nations 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 defense 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 authorize any landing any longer, a dramatic situation,” he said.
Under current EU rules, asylum seekers are supposed to apply for protection in the first EU country they enter. At the height of the migration crisis in late 2015, EU leaders set up a quota system to try to distribute some of the migrants from the main arrival nations of Greece and Italy, but it has barely gotten off the ground.
The influx has strained Italian infrastructure— and the goodwill of Italian voters.
Italian citizens, once relatively friendly to migrants, rejected many politicians seen as soft on immigration in local elections on Sunday. Anti-immigrant hard-liners were much more successful, putting pressure on the country’s ruling center-left Democratic Party to be seen easing 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 Thursday alongside other European leaders in Berlin as they prepared for the Group of 20 summit of world powers nextweek.
Italy and Greece “cannot be left alone in this refugee crisis,” European Commission President JeanClaude Juncker told reporters on Friday.