At Lampedusa, 6,000 Immigrants In Just One Day

An “apocalypse” is how Italian  Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has just described the situation at Lampedusa, the Italian island where so many of the boats coming from North African ports land, spilling their boatloads of economic migrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa. Just now, in a single day, 6,000 (the latest reports give a figure of  8,000) of these migrants landed at Lampedusa. Christine Douglass-Williams wrote about this here, and more on this “apocalypse” can be found here: “‘Apocalypse’ – Italy’s Lampedusa hit with 6,000 migrants in 24 hours as state of emergency declared,” Remix News, September 14, 2023:

The situation on the Italian island of Lampedusa is coming to a head, with the local government declaring a state of emergency after more than 6,000 [now 8,000] illegal migrants were registered on the small Italian Mediterranean island on Tuesday.

Besides an influx of hundreds of boats sailing toward Italy’s harbors, scenes of violence were recorded, with migrants trying to break through police lines.

Once they are on dry land, the migrants do not wait peaceably for the authorities to process their documents, or deal with their lack of them. Some of them try to break through the police lines, attempting to escape  into the countryside, without having to undergo questioning about their so-called “asylum seeker” status. This has led to some policemen being hurt.

“Apocalypse on Lampedusa. Italian police are trying to keep illegal African migrants in check. Meanwhile, 160 boats have arrived with 8,000 illegals: just young, strong men who are migrating into our social systems,” wrote former Alternative for Germany (AfD) politician Georg Pazderski on X.

Mayor Filippo Mannino has responded by declaring a state of emergency on Wednesday [Sept. 14] evening, as reported by the Ansa news agency. He demanded more support for the small island, which he said is under “great stress.” Officially, the number of migrants on the island now outnumbers the actual residents.

“Everyone has helped in some way the migrants who needed help. But now it’s really time to look for a structural solution,” Mannino said. However, it is unclear what the state of emergency will actually achieve without concrete support from the ruling conservatives in Italy, who already declared a nationwide emergency in April as migration numbers soared via the Mediterranean route.

The ruling conservatives in Rome declared a “state of emergency” last April when the numbers of migrants landing in Lampedusa skyrocketed. But after that declaration, nothing changed. There were no  roundups of illegal immigrants. No sending migrants back on Italian naval ships to the North African ports from where they had left in the rickety boats of the traffickers. Even before April, in the fall of 2022, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had promised to impose a blockade in the Mediterranean, whereby the Italian navy would prevent boats that had left North African ports carrying migrants from reaching Lampedusa or other Italian ports. Despite Meloni’s repeated promises to install that  naval blockade, nothing has yet been done.

The island, which lies between Sicily and North Africa, has been a major center for migration for years. On Wednesday [Sept. 14] afternoon, hundreds of migrants tried to break through barriers, according to media reports and video posted to social media. A police spokesperson refused to comment on the chaos on the island.

Despite talk of solidarity on the issue of migration, there is growing tension between the left-wing German government and Italy’s conservative-led government, with Germany suspending the voluntary admission of illegal migrants from Italy.

Many of the migrants who land in Lampedusa do not remain in Italy, but attempt to move to Germany, where welfare benefits are higher. The current German government, though it is left-wing on the subject of migration, has finally been mugged by reality, and now refuses to admit illegal migrants who arrive from Italy.

Germany, which is dealing with its own immigration crisis, had pledged to take in 3,500 migrants from burdened countries in Southern Europe such as Italy. So far, 1,700 have been transferred to Germany, including 1,043 from Italy, but now Germany argues that Italy is refusing to accept over 10,000 migrants that Germany wants to return under “Dublin rules,” which stipulate that asylum requests have to be handled in the country where a migrant first claims asylum….

Germany is as overwhelmed as Italy with its own immigration crisis, which began in 2015, when Chancellor Angela Merkel so foolishly admitted one million Muslim economic migrants into the country, and ever since, Germany has continued to admit several hundred thousand each year. The current yearly cost of the welfare benefits for those migrants comes to the colossal sum of 36 billion euros, and that amount goes up every year, pari passu with the admission, each year, of those hundreds of thousands of new Muslim economic migrants.

A total of 101,386 migrants landed on Italian islands or the mainland between Jan. 1 and Aug. 16, more than double the 48,000 who arrived in the same period last year, and almost triple the 34,556 landings recorded in 2021.

The numbers of immigrants coming to Italy have skyrocketed — tripled between 2001 and 2003. These are almost all illegal immigrants, counting on the Italian state not to deport them back to their countries of origin. In fact, many of them try to move beyond Italy to European countries, such as Germany and Sweden, where the welfare state benefits are the highest.

In the vast majority of cases, migrants who land in Italy seek to move farther north to countries like Germany and Austria.

But now Germany has announced that it will be turning back these migrants arriving to seek better benefits, relying on the Dublin Rules that the EU has adopted, which requires that all requests for asylum must be handled in the first European country that the migrant has landed in –which for so many of those now in Germany means Italy.

Prime Minister Meloni has stopped mentioning the fact that Italian fertility rates are the lowest in Europe, at 1.24 children for each woman, and among the lowest in the world. She no longer mentions that Italians are  “in danger of disappearing,” to be replaced by economic immigrants from the Global South, who are overwhelmingly Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East.  She has yet to institute obvious pro-natalist policies such as a year of paid maternity leave, and free creches, nursery schools, and kindergartens, and generous family allowances paid by the state or each child. If all of these measures were to be undertaken, it would cost the state billions of euros. But in order to ensure that the people of Italy remain truly Italian, so that the country that contains fully one-third of the world’s artistic treasures doesn’t turn into a dreary mosque-filled outpost of North Africa (with some of its new inhabitants sure to smash up many of those treasures), isn’t it worth it?