The Ministry of the Interior intends to forcibly distribute at least some of the refugees to other parts of the country in the coming days.
Photo: REUTERS
An unprecedented wave of African immigrants literally covered southern Italy. In the last 48 hours alone, more than 7,500 internally displaced people from the black continent have landed on the famous island of Lampedusa, which has become a symbol of the migration crisis. The local authorities turned out to be completely unprepared for such a development of events: not only is there nowhere to accommodate so many people, but the police do not have time to carry out the necessary procedures. No identification, photography or fingerprinting is carried out as required by EU regulations. At best, a medical examination, and even then only in the case of those who are clearly ill.
Consequently, real chaos reigns in the Imbriacola accommodation center: currently in the center, with capacity for 400 people, there are 4,500 tired, hungry and disoriented immigrants. The previous day, the police had been forced several times to stop fights that broke out here and there over food and blankets.
The Ministry of the Interior intends to forcibly distribute at least some of the refugees to other parts of the country in the coming days. However, the problem is that this idea was strongly opposed by municipal authorities, who do not want to repeat the experience of their colleagues who took on the first “batch” of resettlement quotas. Thus, in the small town of Monruino (800 inhabitants), in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, the mayor was forced to give up the town hall meeting room to spend the night to a group of unaccompanied minors. In Padua, migrants initially housed in the gymnasiums of two schools ended up in an abandoned civilian airport. In six provinces, asylum seekers will be housed in properties confiscated from the mafia.
Experts and human rights activists point out that the real reason for the collapse was the call. The “Cutro decree”, which in 2023 closed the doors of the accommodation system that previously operated for internally displaced people, with the exception of those with official refugee status.
The situation is so serious that the head of the Italian Foreign Ministry, Antonio Tajani, called on the EU to contribute to solving the problem of a new wave of migration crisis. Prime Minister George Meloni made a similar statement.
However, the bloc’s allies, mainly France and Germany, are not only in no hurry to intervene, but also accuse Rome of violating the Dublin Regulation. Thus, the forced refusal to fingerprint incoming migrants is interpreted as an attempt by the authorities to facilitate the rapid crossing of the Italian border by migrants. In this context, the French have already announced that they will double the number of border guards in the “worrying” direction.
