Italy not fingerprinting all migrants despite EU law, study shows
About 25% slipped through cracks and out of Italy in first half of 2014
Every day, boatloads of refugees arrive on Italian shores. European Union law requires Italy to fingerprint them, so that if they apply for asylum in another country they can be sent back to their port of entry. Instead, Italy is letting thousands of migrants slip quietly into northern Europe, with no record of their time in Italy.
An Associated Press analysis of EU and Italian data suggests as much as a quarter of migrants who should have been fingerprinted in the first half of 2014 weren’t. EU law required Italy to share fingerprints for about 56,700 of the migrants, but only 43,382 sets were sent.
Even accounting for possible delays in sending fingerprints to Brussels, it’s clear thousands of refugees are slipping through the cracks.
“It’s a very serious problem,” European Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem told the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter this week.
After complaints from member states, the European Commission is studying whether Italy is living up to its EU obligations.
EU countries are angry they can’t send migrants back to their first port of entry when there is no record of where that was. Human rights officials worry that UN protections can’t benefit refugees if they don’t officially exist.
Italy, by not fingerprinting migrants, avoids the possibility that they’ll be sent back. It is already spending US$13 million a month to rescue thousands of migrants making the perilous crossing from North Africa aboard smugglers’ boats, in an operation launched after 360 migrants drowned off Sicily last year, and it feels it’s doing more than its share already.
The refugees themselves are happy not to be fingerprinted. With unemployment at 12.6 per cent and youth unemployment at 43 per cent, new arrivals have little interest in staying in Italy and would rather settle in northern Europe where there are better job opportunities and more established refugee communities.
Aided by Rome’s blind eye, Syrian migrants, in particular, are falling off Italy’s radar, making their way to Milan’s central train station in groups of 100 or more. They are met by railway police, aid workers and city officials who offer food, a bed and — for those who ask — advice on asylum.
Of the 10,500 who arrived in Milan since October, only eight requested asylum in Italy, city officials said. Many others, after a few hours or days in Milan, headed north with no record of having set foot in Italy.
“No Syrian wants to get fingerprinted,” said Shadi Howara, a doctor from Damascus passing through Milan.
The Italian Interior Ministry reported 60,435 migrants arrived by boat in Italy this year through June 30. A number of those are accompanied children who, by EU rules, shouldn’t be fingerprinted; Save the Children estimates there were 3,700. During the same period, the EU said Italy shared 43,382 sets of fingerprints.
As more Syrians began to arrive and officials spotted children sprawled out on stone benches, the city of Milan set up a welcome desk in the train station in October, the city’s top immigration official, Pierfrancesco Majorino, said.
The scene is surreal: As a nearby escalator ferries fashionable commuters to and from work in Italy’s financial capital, Syrian refugees mill about in donated clothes and little more than a plastic bag’s worth of belongings, waiting for the next train north.
Why haven’t they been fingerprinted? “You have to ask the Interior Ministry,” Majorino said, adding that only law enforcement agencies, not city workers, are authorized to carry out the task.
The Interior Ministry declined repeated requests for comment.