Europe is challenged by a record influx of migrants, according to The Spectator.
Italy was the first country to experience the impact of the migrant crisis. Last weekend, hundreds of migrants, mostly African, left a transfer centre in Porto Empedocle in Sicily. When they started wandering around shops in search of food, the mayor was forced to appeal to residents on social media. He told frightened locals that there were 2,000 migrants in the 250-person facility, so repeated attempts to leave the overcrowded centre were inevitable.
Lampedusa crisis
The situation worsened when 11,000 migrants arrived on the island of Lampedusa in five days. There were 6,000 migrants in a facility designed for 600 people. The arrivals were forced to fight among themselves for food.
To get food is a problem. If you don’t fight, you don’t have food.
The number of migrants arriving this year has doubled to 130,000, and the scale of the crisis is about to shake European politics to its foundations.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the speaker of the country’s most Mussolini-sympathetic right-wing circles, came to power promising a tough stance on immigration. However, she then changed political course, adopting a moderate pro-European stance, even on immigration.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was Meloni’s guest on Lampedusa. Together they called for a rationalisation of the EU’s “migration pact” policy, adopted in June. According to the document, asylum seekers will be distributed across all twenty-seven countries of the European Union.
We will decide who comes to the European Union and under what circumstances, not the smugglers and traffickers. The most effective measures to counter the smugglers’ lies are legal pathways and humanitarian corridors.
Italian voters are not worried about human traffickers, but about the arrival of huge numbers of migrants. Italians want a blocco navale.
Blocco navale is a system that came about after the huge influx of migrants from the war in Syria. Then Pakistanis, Afghans, Iraqis and others joined the refugees fleeing the Middle East, and soon millions were heading to the EU. At the time, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Europe would be able to accommodate them. In reality, however, things turned out somewhat differently.
The situation is complicated for Meloni by the case of Roberto Vannacci, the general who this summer published Il Mondo al Contrario (The World Turned Upside-Down). He has championed Italian rights against migration, gay rights and political correctness.
It hit number one on Amazon early last month and hasn’t moved since. As the flow of migrants has increased, Vannacci has been ever more seen on television.
Solving the problem
There are two ways to help a country in Italy’s situation. One is to provide resources to block the movement of migrants before they reach Italy. However, the EU does not have its own navy to achieve these goals.
The second way is to ensure that migrants arriving on Italy’s shores are fairly distributed. However, some European countries, such as Austria, Denmark, Hungary, Latvia, Poland and Slovakia, categorically exclude the admission of migrants.
The problem has its roots in the EU’s “Dublin Regulation,” which has shown itself to be unworkable. To prevent migrants from piling up in Germany, Scandinavia and other well-to-do countries, responsibility for their food and housing should fall on the country where they first arrive.
In November, Italy refused to grant landing rights to the Ocean Viking ship. The 230 migrants on board disembarked in Toulon and disappeared, sparking outrage in part of the French public.
Opinion of the EU countries
Jordan Bardella, president of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, called on President Emmanuel Macron to promise that “France would not accept a single migrant from the joint operation on Lampedusa.” Eric Ciotti, one of the most “bourgeois” Republicans, supports such a decision.
If France embraces the logic of sharing migrants, it opens the door to even more massive arrivals.
Alternative für Deutschland, a German radical anti-immigration party, has gained over twenty per cent in polls across the country. German voters tell pollsters that immigration is “Problem no. 1” for their country. Bavaria’s Minister-President Markus Söder has called for an “integration limit” of 200,000 people.
The number of migrants arriving in the UK by boat last year – 46,000 – does not look serious compared to the refugee flows in the Mediterranean.
The situation in Lampedusa is directly linked to the West’s misplaced priorities and distorted threat assessments.
Conclusion
European immigration policy will shape the politics of the next generation. There will be those (like the Salvini supporter who carried a banner reading “Give Lampedusa back to Africa” last weekend) who worry that countries are vulnerable to an impending wave of immigrants. There will also be those (such as the late French writer Jean Raspail, author of The Camp of the Saints) who propose fighting migrants on the beaches. As former French President Nicholas Sarkozy said:
The migration crisis has not even started.
