The year 2017 marked what Italian authorities hope was a turning point in the nation’s struggle to manage a rush of migrants to its shores.
Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni this week called it a pivotal moment in Italy’s “historic transition from immigration managed by criminals to controlled, legal and safe migration”.
While migrants who made the journey across the Mediterranean in rickety boats still numbered nearly 119,000, it was a roughly one-third drop over the previous year.
However, Italy’s effort to tackle the issue has not been without controversy, including its moves to enlist the help of powerful militias to curb traffickers’ activity.
Between January and June, Italy saw a nearly 20 per cent jump in the number of migrants arriving by sea, while asylum applications exploded as its EU neighbours — France, Switzerland and Austria — had closed their borders.
In just the last three days of June, a total of 10,400 people landed in Italy.
With legislative elections on the horizon — now set for March 2018 — immigration has been a key issue, particularly for Italy’s right and the populist Five Star Movement (M5S).
Everything began to change in July as migrant boat departures from Libya dropped. Sea arrivals in the past six months have fallen by 70 per cent compared with the same period last year.
The drop has been attributed to a combination of an Italian-led boosting of the Libyan coastguard’s ability to intercept boats and efforts to seek the assistance of powerful militias.
There have also been moves to tighten Libya’s southern borders, accelerate repatriations from Libya and measures to stem the flow of migrants through transit states such as Niger and Sudan.
However, harrowing accounts emerged of migrants throwing themselves overboard in order to avoid being sent back to the chaos in Libya. International outrage over the situation was stoked by a media report on migrant Africans being sold as slaves in Libya.
Italy has continued to press its contacts in Libya to push ahead with another prong of its migrant policy. It has sought the processing of migrants on-site, in cooperation with UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration, with a programme of repatriating economic migrants and transferring vulnerable people.
Italy’s Interior Minister Marco Minniti says up to 10,000 refugees could benefit from these humanitarian corridors in 2018, provided they can be spread among EU partners. — AFP
Fanny Carrier
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