Migration opens the door to Italy’s
populists
Rome feels it has been abandoned by
Europe over the migrant crisis just as a local backlash is boosting the
opposition
AUGUST 1, 2017 by: James Politi in Salerno
Early on the morning of July 14, the Vos Prudence, a ship
run by Médecins Sans Frontières, docked in the southern Italian city of
Salerno, carrying 934 people rescued in the Mediterranean Sea near war-torn
Libya. As she stepped on to European soil, one Nigerian woman began chanting a
prayer, sparking applause in the port. Most of the survivors were quickly
dispatched to reception centres across the country, with just 300 remaining in
the region.
But even this relatively small group was enough to trigger
the ire of Mariano Falcone, a local rightwing politician who has vowed to chain
himself to the gates of the port in protest at the next disembarkation of
migrants in his city.
“We cannot take on the burden of all these desperate people,
Italy has its own problems,” he says sitting in a café along Salerno’s
seafront. Mr Falcone has a dark view of migration to Italy. He speaks of
“ethnic substitution”, “attempted Islamisation”, and the likelihood of
“ferocious social clashes” between poor Italians and the growing immigrant
population. He feels his side, the Eurosceptic Northern League led by Matteo
Salvini — which has risen to third place in national polls — is winning the
argument.
“People are finally understanding that this is a battle for
legality, social justice, and freedom for our people,” he says. Advocates for
migrants in Salerno believe it is a humanitarian duty to care for the new
arrivals and argue that it offers an economic opportunity given the country’s
demographic decline, but they concede their case is struggling.
“The climate is not
serene. What is emerging is the phenomenon of fear, of risk,” says Antonio
Bonifacio, who heads the local Catholic Archdiocese’s migration office. “Things
have become more complicated with these arrivals.”
Italy’s migration crisis, which has seen almost 95,000
people from South Asia, the Middle East and Africa being rescued in the central
Mediterranean Sea this year, appears to have reached a political tipping point,
after years of mounting pressure. With a general election expected in early 2018,
the public backlash risks fuelling populist opposition parties in the
eurozone’s third-largest economy, while weakening the pro-EU ruling centre-left
Democratic party (PD) and its government led by Paolo Gentiloni, the prime
minister.
It has also strained diplomatic relations between Italy and
some EU member states — including France under Emmanuel Macron — at a time when
the bloc is trying to regroup and press ahead with new forms of integration
after the shock of the Brexit vote.
***
Compared with 2016, the rise in migrants to Italy has
actually been small. As of Monday, arrivals by sea were just 1 per cent higher
than in the same period last year, according to the Italian interior ministry,
meaning the final tally for 2017 will not necessarily exceed last year’s record
number of 181,000 migrants. But it is the accumulation of this year’s arriving
migrants on top of more than 500,000 over the past three years that is causing
strain, logistically and politically, say officials.
The UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, has warned that reception
centres are almost at capacity. “Close to 200,000 accommodation places are
available for refugees and migrants across the country, but are nearly all
full,” it says.
Compounding the problem for Italy is that its neighbours —
France, Switzerland and Austria — have successfully tightened their border
controls to prevent migrants from crossing the Alps, with police monitoring
train, road and even foot traffic and promptly sending people back to Italy. It
means Italy has shifted from being primarily a country of transit for many
migrants wanting to travel north, to a country of settlement, worsening its
predicament.
Nando Pagnoncelli, a pollster at Ipsos, says that in 2014,
just 3 per cent of Italians cited immigration as a major concern. That has
risen to 35 per cent this year. “The attention is rising sharply and it’s a
very sensitive theme,” he says. “ The attitude is of closure [vis-à-vis the
migrants] and the main reasons are worries about security, access to work, and
access to public services.”
After more than 12,000 migrants were rescued and brought to
Italian ports in a huge search-and-rescue operation in early June, the
political environment became overheated. Mr Gentiloni and Matteo Renzi, the PD
leader, delayed a parliamentary vote on a contentious citizenship law for the
Italian-born children of immigrants after centrist members of the coalition
balked, threatening the survival of the government. Mr Renzi called for a limit
on new arrivals.
Officials are scrambling to manage the practical side of
caring for and housing for those who have already arrived, arguing with
regional governors who refuse to take their share of migrants. Internationally,
much of the country’s diplomatic energy is being devoted to searching for short
and long-term remedies to the flows.
One precondition is peace and stability in Libya. Last week
Mr Gentiloni hosted Fayez al-Sarraj, prime minister in the UN-recognised Libyan
government, to discuss a controversial plan to have the Italian navy operate in
Libyan waters to help intercept migrant ships. But there are no guarantees this
will succeed in practice, and if it does, it could raise concerns about the
proper treatment of the migrants under international law since they would be
returned to a place where they often suffer beatings, torture, rape and forced
labour.
***
In recent years, Italy has dramatically increased its
diplomatic focus on countries in Africa that are the main source and transit
countries for migrants, including Nigeria, Senegal, Niger and Mali. The hope is
to trade economic incentives for co-operation in stopping migrants from leaving
and accepting their deportation back home.
“We have to intervene all together with great determination
in Africa, without committing the errors of the past, otherwise in four to six
years we will have millions of people moving towards Europe,” Antonio Tajani,
the Rome-born president of the European Parliament, told Italian TV this week.
While Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has spoken of a
“Marshall plan” for Africa, there are doubts about whether this can be mounted
successfully. The EU has pledged €2.6bn in aid for African countries, but its
request for matching funds from member states has largely been ignored: just
€200m has been raised. The contrast with the alacrity with which the EU funded
a €6bn deal with Turkey to stop migration flows along the so-called Balkan
route in 2015 jars with many in Rome.
The EU has offered nearly €900m to help Italy manage the
crisis, but this does not come close to covering the annual cost to Rome,
estimated by the finance ministry to have been €3.6bn in 2016 and expected to
top €4bn this year.
Meanwhile, EU countries are not fully implementing their
pledges under an EU scheme to relocate refugees from Italy and Greece, and are
ignoring Brussels’ call for an overhaul of asylum rules to take the pressure
off front-line states. Other solutions, such as offering large-scale schemes
for legal migration from Africa as an alternative to the illegal flows, have
been proposed by the UN, but are unlikely to be taken up.
Italian officials, and the public, feel abandoned by their
fellow Europeans on migration, adding to tension over economic policy that has
dominated relations between Rome and Brussels since the financial crisis.
“Europe seems deaf, deaf, to Italy’s requests on migration,” says Laura
Boldrini, the speaker of the lower house of parliament and a former official at
the UNHCR. “Many countries are not willing to co-operate in finding a solution,
they are not taking on their responsibilities.”
The disappointment is mostly with EU member states, rather
than the European Commission, which has, under the presidency of Jean-Claude
Juncker, moved to address some of Italy’s demands for assistance, beginning in
the spring 2015. “Migration has been the number-one priority,” says Natasha Bertaud,
a spokeswoman for the commission. “We have done more on this issue in the past
two years than was achieved in the past 20.”
Italian officials are now ramping up the rhetoric on
migration in an attempt to pressure European countries to show more solidarity.
For instance, they threatened to shut ports to foreign vessels carrying rescued
migrants unless they took some home directly, but this tough talk is often
dismissed or ignored.
Nathalie Tocci, director of the Rome-based Institute for
International Affairs, says Italy has legitimate gripes with its European
partners but the criticism often backfires. “Italy is completely incapable of
putting itself in other people’s shoes. No one asks: ‘What are we ready to
give?’ or “Why would the others accept this?’. This is how negotiating works,”
Ms Tocci says.
The Italian despair often ignores the country’s shortcomings
in handling the crisis. The pace of relocations from Italy is so slow partly
because its own authorities are not processing enough Eritreans, who would be
eligible for the asylum programme, swiftly enough. Asylum procedures are
cumbersome, leading many migrants to stay in Italian cities, without an answer
on their final legal status, for months. Among those ultimately denied the
right to stay, deportation is rare: there were only 5,789 forced returns from
Italy in 2016 and little more than 3,367 so far this year, says the European
Commission.
***
It is not entirely clear how the politics will shake out.
Recent polls have the PD neck-and-neck with the Eurosceptic, anti-establishment
Five Star Movement led by comedian Beppe Grillo, with each supported by about
27 per cent of Italians. Both are suffering, however, while Mr Salvini’s
Northern League appears to be gaining. In some national polls, it is recording
15 per cent support.
Along Salerno’s seafront, where 5,000 migrants have docked
this year and residents are coping with the post-crisis legacy of 17.5 per cent
unemployment, there is restlessness. Many do not accept that in an advanced
economy already losing 150,000 residents annually to emigration, and whose
population of 60m is expected to shrink by 7m people by 2065, it should be
manageable to absorb newcomers.
“I am not nasty, but
there are too many of them, troppi immigrati,” says Giorgio Molino, a
69-year-old retired public sector worker. Miriam Gaudino, a 26-year-old student
and Five Star voter, blames the EU. “This should be everyone’s responsibility.
Italy is in crisis. Europe should help but they are not.”
Babacar, an 18-year-old migrant from Senegal who arrived by
sea in January and sells sunglasses in Salerno, has noted a shift in the public
mood. “I hear more Italians want to stop migration.”
For Mr Bonifacio, that would be tragic. “If people meet
them, they will discover the beauty of their culture, and the importance of
what they lived through to get here.” He adds that if integration fails, there
could be trouble. “All these kids have expectations and dreams: if we don’t
respond humanely and with dignity, they will be angry.”
Rescue operations: under-fire NGOs accused of driving
migration
As the migration crisis escalated this year, Italian
authorities raised their scrutiny of charitable organisations operating
search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean Sea.
Non-governmental organisations such as Save the Children,
MSF, and SOS Méditerranée have their own boats that they send close to the
Libyan coast to help save migrants as their rubber dinghies or ramshackle
wooden vessels get into trouble. They insist they are simply fulfilling a
humanitarian duty to save lives. More than 2,200 people have died on the sea
journey this year alone according to the International Organisation for
Migration.
Rome has become concerned that NGOs are acting as a “pull
factor” in driving migration, since smugglers could nearly always count on a
rescue shortly after departing north Africa.
The political pressure mounted after a prosecutor in Sicily
began to investigate alleged collusion between the NGO boats and the human
traffickers, though no charges were brought. Still, the Italian interior
ministry drafted a “code of conduct” for the NGOs operating rescue boats who
want to dock in Italian ports, which has split the charity groups.
This week, Save the Children and two other groups signed up
to it, while MSF refused, arguing that some of the provisions in the code of
conduct did not fit “fundamental humanitarian principles of independence,
neutrality and impartiality”.
It also took issue with a ban on transferring migrants to
other larger ships, which would imply that NGO ships would have to carry
survivors directly to Italian ports. MSF warned that this would lead to more
“mass drownings” as fewer rescue boats could be in the search-and-rescue area.
Save the Children accepted the terms to help foster a “climate of trust and
transparency” around its missions.
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