The Government of Giorgia Meloni declared a state of emergency yesterday after the disembarkation of more than 3,000 people in Italy in three days. The measure gives extraordinary powers to the prime minister to speed up expulsions of migrants. But what has happened in recent months in this country that justifies the use of this legal figure? And what role does the European Union play in all this?
Italy considers that the EU is not giving an answer to the migratory crisis and leaves the responsibility to fall on the southern states: Italy, Spain, Greece and Malta mainly. The fact that it is now willing to adopt unprecedented measures is, above all, a warning message to Brussels. It should be remembered that one of Meloni’s electoral promises was to end illegal immigration. The trigger for a drastic measure such as the state of emergency to have been taken has been the arrival of more than 3,000 people in recent days on the coasts of Italy (more than 30,000 so far this year). This exceptional measure has been used up to 128 times in the last 20 years, but it is the first time that it has been applied in immigration matters, since it is usually reserved for natural disasters.
The state of emergency means that the Meloni government can make decisions and approve measures without consulting Parliament. It will be implemented throughout the national territory for six months and one of its most immediate consequences is the opening of new repatriation centers to facilitate expulsions. The executive wants to give the impression that it is tackling the migration problem, especially after having been highly questioned by the dramatic shipwreck in Calabria, last February, in which 91 refugees died.
Days before the aforementioned shipwreck – which occurred just 150 meters from the coast – the Government had approved a decree to make it difficult for NGOs to rescue at sea. And, in November of the previous year, Meloni had already given a pulse to the EU by refusing to give port to several boats with hundreds of migrants who were sailing with hardly any food. It should be noted at this point that one of the architects of the closed ports policy is the current vice president of the government, Matteo Salvini. In fact, the Palermo Court is currently holding a trial against Salvini for preventing for nearly 20 days in August 2019, when he was Minister of the Interior, the disembarkation of dozens of immigrants rescued by the NGO Open Arms.
The truth is that not much. Three years ago the Commission presented a proposal for a European Pact on Migration and Asylum to find solutions, but this has been frozen for three years. Europe is not capable of providing a solution to the countries most affected by arrivals and protecting migrants at the same time. Behind this paralysis there is a deep division of opinion among all member states on how the problem should be approached. Some countries advocate tight border control and others are more inclined to welcome. In addition, various factors deepen this division, from the war in Ukraine – which, paradoxically, showed that the EU is capable of mobilizing in record time to welcome those who fled this country – to the rise of conservative executives in traditionally open countries to immigration, as is the case in Italy but also in the Nordic countries, such as Denmark, which has the objective of not receiving any asylum seekers.
Since the beginning of 2023, arrivals in Italy have amounted to 31,000 migrants, almost four times more than the nearly 8,000 that did in the same period of 2022, according to the official count. The most complicated thing right now is lived on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa. There, the reception center accommodates about 1,200 people but barely has the capacity for about 400. However, we must look at these data with perspective and remember that the situation is not even remotely similar to that of 2015 and that, Compared to other nations, Italy is not experiencing a dramatic situation.
In 2015, more than a million refugees arrived in Europe, the vast majority fleeing the war in Syria. “There is no emergency and the only problem is the lack of planning, destined to feed the rhetoric of the electorally effective invasion,” Felipe Miraglia, head of immigration for the Arci social association, denounced yesterday on his Twitter profile. According to data from the IOM and the European Commission, the reception of refugees weighs heavily on developing countries. Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon or Uganda are the nations in the world that host the most refugees.
One last note. In a June 2021 analysis by the European Parliament titled ‘The impact of misinformation on migrants in the EU’, the authors analyzed news stories about migrants in Italy and concluded that they were mostly presented as an economic threat. , health or even criminal. The data contradicts those claims. In the last ten years, despite a slight increase in the presence of foreigners in Italy, both the absolute number of foreigners arrested and the arrest rate have decreased. In addition, in 2021, and according to data from Oxfam Italy from December 2022, 53,610 people requested asylum in Italy -which represents 0.09% of the population. Spain, France or Germany received a much higher number of asylum applications (in Germany there were almost four times as many, more than 190,000 applications).
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