EU: Italy refuses to accept shipwrecked migrants
Hundreds of desperate people were stranded on a ship last week, said Francesco Riccardi in Avvenire (Italy), yet rather than help them, France and Italy behaved “like squabbling schoolboys.” The 234 migrants, 57 of them children, had set off from the coast of Libya in October in rickety vessels and were rescued from “death at sea” by the Norwegian-flagged charity ship OceanViking. They should have gone straight to Italy, the closest safe harbor. But the brand-new government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni refused to let the ship dock, complaining that Italy had already taken nearly 90,000 such arrivals this year and saying the ship should go to France instead, or even to Norway. After three weeks, as conditions aboard deteriorated, Meloni put France on the spot by thanking Paris for accepting the migrants—even though it had done no such thing. His hand forced, French President Emmanuel Macron grudgingly allowed the ship to dock in France but threatened to punish Italy by tearing up a deal to relocate asylum seekers. This is no way for the EU to conduct its affairs, with two of its oldest members at each other’s throats. What happened “to the common good”?
Meloni, the EU’s first extreme-right leader, knew exactly what she was doing, said Le Monde (France) in an editorial. Migration is “the main issue that feeds the far right in every country,” and it is constantly threatening the integrity of our union. The mishandling of the migrant crisis of 2015—when more than 1 million people arrived on European shores from Syria, Afghanistan, and
Iraq—fed xenophobia and spurred the rise of extreme-right parties across the continent. Ever since, those nationalists have made “migrants the scapegoats for all society’s ills,” from unemployment to terrorism. Perhaps it’s a bit histrionic, said Dominik Straub in the Aargauer Zeitung (Switzerland), to call the NGO ships that patrol the Mediterranean looking for migrants “pirate ships,” as Meloni did. But it’s not as if Meloni closed Italian ports to migrants altogether—in fact, in the first two weeks that her government was in office, Italy allowed more than 9,000 boat people ashore, many of whom had been rescued by Italian ships. It’s just the NGO ships she wants to turn away. And indeed, it’s hard to see why Germany, Norway, Spain, and other countries won’t commit to at least resettling those people rescued by ships flying their flags. That seems like “a minimum of European solidarity.”
We’ve been having this same argument for decades, said Bernd Riegert in Deutsche Welle (Germany). We’ve tried establishing asylum centers in northern Africa; we’ve tried cooperating with the migrants’ countries of origin; we’ve sought to “undercut the financial gains for traffickers.” Nothing has stopped the boats. Still, Italy is not overrun, and it must not be allowed to play the victim. Migrants may land in Italy first, but they don’t stay there—they apply for asylum disproportionately in Germany, France, and Spain. EU leaders need to work out a way to share that load fairly. Until they do, “this inhumane game of refugee bingo” will continue.