Lampedusa: Italy tightens its legislation against irregular migrants

Antonino Galofaro // Photo credit: Alessandro SERRANO / AFP 10:29 am, September 19, 2023

The Italian government on Monday approved new measures to stem migrant arrivals, including creating more detention centres and increasing detention times for rejected migrants to deter departures from North Africa. A sharp rise in arrivals on the small Italian island of Lampedusa, where some 8,500 migrants landed in three days last week, has forced the far-right government into crisis management mode.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni promised on Sunday that her government would carry out a new turn of the screw, including by extending the maximum detention period for illegal immigrants from 135 days to 18 months. "This means – and I am sending this very clear message to all of Africa – that if you rely on traffickers to violate Italian law, when you arrive in Italy you should know that you will be arrested and then repatriated," she said.

I don't think it will be a big deterrent."

The increase in the detention period was approved Monday in the council of ministers, according to a government source to AFP. It will now have to be voted on in parliament. This reform will also prevent the Italian authorities from being legally obliged to release foreigners subject to a deportation decision if the expulsion procedure has not been completed within the current 135-day period.

After disembarking in Italy, the vast majority of migrants are sent to reception centres throughout the country where they are staying pending a decision on their asylum application. Migrants awaiting deportation are sent to detention centres for illegal aliens, of which there are nine on the peninsula, including Bari (south), Rome (centre) and Milan (north). The maximum detention period was 18 months in Italy from 2011 to 2014, then it was reduced by the left-wing government led by Matteo Renzi.

Will this measure have an impact? "I don't think it will be a big deterrent and enough to convince people fleeing much worse situations than those they are here," Alfonso Giordano, a migration expert and professor at Rome's Luiss University, told AFP.

A 10-point plan

The nine existing detention centres have a maximum capacity of 1,161 people. Nearly 6,400 people stayed there in 2022, most of them from Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria and Albania. Just over 3,150 of them have been repatriated, according to Italy's prison control authority, while the rest remain inadmissible but in most cases unable to be deported. Meloni, who won last year's parliamentary election with a staunchly anti-migrant agenda, said Sunday that the Defense Ministry would also be tasked with setting up new detention centers "as soon as possible."

By the end of 2022, the government allocated €42.5 million for new detention centres, and the Ministry of Defence is expected to convert existing sites in sparsely populated areas. Nearly 130,000 people have arrived in Italy since the beginning of the year, compared to 68,200 in 2022, according to the latest figures published Monday by the Ministry of the Interior. European Commission President Ursula von Der Leyen, who visited Lampedusa on Sunday with Giorgia Meloni, has proposed a ten-point plan to help Rome deal with the crisis.

This plan aims both to take a firm stand against smugglers and traffickers and to facilitate legal pathways to enter the European Union for those who are eligible to apply for asylum. "As long as there is not concerted action at European level, with integrated control of the Mediterranean (...) we can make all the announcements we want at the national level (...) but the situation will not change," said Professor Alfonso Giordano.

More than 80 NGOs, associations and collectives denounced Monday in a statement the European plan, castigating "old recipes that the European Union has been serving for decades and which have all failed". "While the French Minister of the Interior has announced his intention to strengthen controls at the Italian border, several other EU member states have said they want to close their doors" to migrants, also deplores this text signed in particular by the NGOs of rescue at sea SeaWatch and Mediterranea Saving Humans.