Sicily, 2023: Illegal migrants are greeted by armed police, manacled and sent back home
SUE REID returns to Europe’s migration frontline — and finds a new determination to stem the tide
is now so well-charted that Tunisian TikTok influencers have put up videos boasting of how simple the journey is from their country to Paris. One posted in February has multiple clips of a recently arrived girl migrant from there, named Sabee al Saidi, dancing under the Eiffel Tower.
After I watched the nine manacled men being marched off for repatriation, a group of four other Tunisians stopped to talk to us on the quayside.
They included student Ihele Bouad, 22, and his friend, Hassen Khlif, 21, who had come in the special migrants’ hold on the early morning Lampedusa ferry. On arrival, they were duly interviewed by port officials at 10am and then — somewhat mysteriously — let go to carry on their journey. When I asked a port immigration official why they had been freed if their fellow travellers were being deported, he told me: ‘They were just lucky this morning. There are too many to send every migrant back to Tunisia. None of these 13 Tunisians today claimed asylum. They are economic migrants, not refugees. They want a better life in Europe and the UK.’
And that is exactly what some are likely to get. Ihele and Hassen related how they had bought places on a traffickers’ boat from Tunisian port Mahdia to Lampedusa a week before.
‘We were then held in a reception centre. There were hundreds of us there,’ he said. ‘Last night they rounded us up, and told us “get on a ferry to Sicily” with a lot of other migrants, many from Africa.’
He added: ‘On arrival, we were given a document which says we must leave Italy within a week. We are going to Paris.’ Astonished, I asked to see his document, which I sent by WhatsApp to London to be translated from Italian and Arabic. What he had told me was true.
I watched as both young men then walked away from the port, after giving me their phone number so I could track their journey northwards. I received a message from the duo 26 hours after I first met them. They had easily bought a £9 per person bus ticket from the port to Sicily’s capital Palermo, arriving in time for a ferry leaving that same day to mainland Italy.
‘We then got another bus to Milan city. We are here now,’ Ihele messaged me on Wednesday afternoon. ‘We’ll reach Paris in a week.’
And, after that? As France flirts with the Right too, these seemingly pleasant young men may not get a warm greeting there. And Rishi Sunak and his ministers know that if the French capital disappoints, the northern coast is only a few hundred miles away.
Then, there is only the Channel to cross to reach Britain. After all, 45,000 made it to Kent on traffickers’ small boats last year. The Government predicted in January that the tally for 2023 — including those who have set off from Tunisia — was likely to be higher.
There are few manacles waiting for migrants in Dover. And the people traffickers are telling them that.