What are we talking about when we talk about information and democracy? So far in 2022 more people have landed on Italian coasts than in 2021 and 2020, years of the pandemic, but after a peak in August, this number has been declining since September. These are official data from the Ministry of the Interior.
On Will, Carlo Notarpietro compared the number of articles on migrants published in Italian newspapers from January 2018 to today and the number of people who landed in Italy in the same period.
It is a graph with two lines that go up and down, but the highs and lows rarely coincide: there have been months in which there has been a lot of talk about migrants in the newspapers and few have arrived and, on the contrary, moments in which spoke little and many came. The peaks of attention coincide with the electoral campaigns and with the blocks decided by the various governments.
Furthermore, despite the constant talk of landings, in the first ten months of 2022 85 thousand people arrived in Europe from the central Mediterranean route, i.e. by sea, and 128 thousand from the Balkan route, therefore by land. Of the 90,000 migrants who arrived in Italy this year, just over 15 percent were rescued by NGO ships, the others disembarked independently or were rescued by the coast guard.
Finally, Italy is not among the first European countries for reception: in 2021 there were 45,200 asylum requests, fewer than in Germany (148,175), France (103,790) and Spain (62,050). And if we consider the number of asylum seekers in relation to the population, Italy was fifteenth.
But all these figures which, in fact, deny an “invasion” fail to scratch the story fed for instrumental reasons by some parties and amplified by most of the media.
An aired survey confirms this from the La7 news, conducted between 9 and 14 November. “The problem of migrants” was the title, already eloquent in itself. “Too many clandestine immigrants are arriving in Italy, we need to greatly reduce arrivals”: 61 percent of the people interviewed said they agreed with this statement. ◆