The double-decker boat, set up like a pirate galleon, slowly approaches the quay on the notes of Bubbles by Vasco Rossi. It’s just after 9pm, the air is hot and windy. The many people on board collect bags, shoes and towels and head towards the exit. “Nice, we had fun”, say two Bergamo tourists as they get on the scooter parked at the end of the pier. The evening tour lasted four hours: it included a tour of the most beautiful beaches, the sighting of dolphins, an aperitif with a DJ set and a spaghetti meal before returning. A long party on the sea, one of the countless attractions of the island of Lampedusa, which even in these late summer days continues to fill up with tourists.
Not far away another boat has recently docked at the Favarolo pier: it is a patrol boat of the financial police, on board there are twenty migrants all from Tunisia, four are minors. The first to get out, limping, is a tall, thin boy. He moves slowly up the ladder, touching his knee.
Waiting for him on the ground are police officers, cultural mediators and some volunteers who offer everyone a glass of water, fruit juice and biscuits. Another boy collapses for a few minutes, holding his head, then gets up and lines up with the other traveling companions who have just landed. All together they get on the white van that awaits them at the end of the quay, cross the city and arrive at the new port.hotspot, the first identification center of Contrada Imbriacola, passing alongside the restaurants full of people on vacation. The structure that hosts them is outside the town, they will remain there until the day of their transfer to the mainland or of repatriation.
The hotspot cannot be exited and only the security and reception staff can enter
On the island that symbolizes immigration to Italy, migrants do not exist. They are a constant but invisible presence: you cannot leave the hotspot and only the security and reception staff can enter, not even journalists are allowed. Until 2019, thanks to a hole in the fence, it was not uncommon to meet newly disembarked migrants, especially around the church, where the parish priest left the wi-fi free to allow him to communicate with family members at home. When the covid-19 pandemic exploded, the network surrounding the center was strengthened to avoid contagion.
“This place looks more like a detention center than a place for the first reception, it is constantly manned by the police”, explains Angelo Farina, one of the two doctors of the hotspot. The procedure after disembarkation is the same for everyone: swab, photo-signaling and pre-identification. “Our task is to carry out adequate medical screenings to identify vulnerable cases and then transfer the clinical picture of each migrant to the doctors of the second reception. But in the summer, with the increase in arrivals, it is difficult for us to operate. The whole system is conceived in an emergency way, every year the same management problems arise even if few people arrive “.
From the beginning of the year to 31 August, 57,168 migrants arrived by sea in Italy, an increase compared to 2021 (when they were 39,410) but a sharp decrease compared to the years of greatest influx of refugees in Italy and Europe: in 2016 and 2017 in the same period on the Italian coasts respectively 115,068 and 99,119 people arrived. Yet the alarmist tones that accompany the resumption of landings on the island in recent days have brought the issue of immigration back to the center of the electoral campaign.
In reality in the month of August in Lampedusa the flow was similar to that of last year: 5,425 arrivals in 176 landings, compared to 5,210 arrivals in 2021 in 189 landings. From 18 to 25 August, due to the strong mistral wind, no one landed. Since the 26th, with the improvement of the sea conditions, 40-50 small boats have arrived a day. A situation that has again produced the overcrowding of the center, which has a maximum capacity of 350 people and which in some days can even accommodate more than a thousand people, if there is no means to transfer them to the structures of other Italian cities.
The emergency according to Salvini
The leader of the League, Matteo Salvini, on August 31st unexpectedly returned to Lampedusa where he had already been at the beginning of the month to inaugurate his electoral tour here. And again he took a tour inside the center of Contrada Imbriacola, accompanied by the Lega Nord deputy mayor of the island, Attilio Lucia. Following the same pattern of August 4, he brought solidarity to the police officers employed in the structure, he did not speak to the migrants present, but only included them in some selfie videos, underlining that they sleep “all crowded” and that “they all have cell phones” . He then denounced the “unworthy conditions” of reception, which however have been the same for months.
Migrants in the hotspot of Lampedusa during the visit of Matteo Salvini, 4 August 2022.
(Emanuele Satolli, Contrast)
In his first visit, after the tour to the center, Salvini had also made a tour of the most beautiful coves aboard the Gamar, the pleasure boat that first came to the rescue after the shipwreck of 3 October 2013, in which 368 people died. Sitting outside his ice cream shop in via Roma, Vito Fiorino, former owner of the boat, suffers to remember that morning. “The tourist season was ending, with some friends we had decided to spend the night out on a boat. At dawn we woke up to return when we heard noises in the distance, they sounded like seagulls. We got closer and never expected to see so many bodies in the water near the coast. After calling for help and we started hauling up people, living bodies, lifeless bodies: the boat is approved for 9, we managed to get 47 survivors in it ”.
For four years Fiorino was unable to talk about that experience, then he sold the boat and today he goes to schools to talk about immigration with the boys. “When Salvini’s photos came out on that boat, many people called me, I didn’t know what to say. The Gamar is no longer mine but it is certainly a symbol. Who knows if you don’t save him too. There is still talk of blocking migration, without asking what happens at sea, without asking about Libyan concentration camps, the detention centers where people are held “.
“The real emergency concerns the people who are unable to arrive in Lampedusa”, underlines Giovanni D’Ambrosio, operator of Mediterranean hope, the program for migrants and refugees of the Federation of Evangelical Churches. D’Ambrosio has lived on the island for a year and a half and says that for some months the arrivals of Tunisian families and migrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh who work in Libya have been increasing.
“We talked to some Egyptian kids who passed through Libyan detention centers and they were shocked: one of the words they remember and repeat is Jalis, seated, that the jailers screamed continuously ”, he says. “We do not want Lampedusa to be exploited for electoral purposes, we think that the solutions for a correct management of arrivals exist, the numbers are not alarming. We have been saying this for some time: fast transfers are needed, even via air bridges so that the structure is not constantly overcrowded ”.
From the security solutions of the center-right to the timid openings of the center-left, the distance between perception and reality is also evident in the electoral programs of the main parties. No one proposes measures for a management of the phenomenon that is structural and in line with respect for rights. The center-right program (Fratelli d’Italia, Lega and Forza Italia) proposes a strongly security vision and a hard fist to stop arrivals.
But while Salvini is thinking of a new version of the security decrees, issued during the first government of Giuseppe Conte, and judged in part unconstitutional by some Italian courts, Giorgia Meloni hypothesizes a “naval blockade”. An electoral slogan that you continuously propose on social networks, but which in reality is an impracticable measure, because it would amount to a hostile act of war. Criticized for the improper use of the term, the leader of the Brothers of Italy corrected the shot, speaking of a “political and non-legal naval blockade” and explaining that the idea is actually to stop arrivals through a new agreement with Libya, similar to the pact between the European Union and Turkey.
Added to this is the proposal for a hotspot in Africa to select migrants before departure, but the solution that is difficult to implement because it is in contrast with the right of asylum, which provides for access to the territory of the state in which protection is sought. .
The Contrada Imbriacola hotspot, in Lampedusa, 4 August 2022.
(Emanuele Satolli, Contrast)
In the electoral campaign of the Democratic Party, immigration occupies a marginal space: on the posters there is only space for it right school, the reform of the law on citizenship, for children born and raised in Italy who have attended a school cycle of at least five years. An agency for the coordination of migration policies is proposed, to monitor compliance with the reception criteria and the effectiveness of integration policies; calls for the abolition of the Bossi Fini law and a new immigration law to allow entry for work reasons, the enlargement of humanitarian corridors and the overcoming of the Dublin regulation.
“The most complex, delicate and divisive issue of contemporary politics is dealt with in a few words and superficially by almost all parties”, says Gianfranco Schiavone, jurist and member of the Association for the legal studies of immigration (Asgi). It is the right-wing parties that give more space to the issue, but without any real analysis. They repeat that there are too many migrants, that only regular entries should be allowed, but the solutions remain archaic and not in step with the times: the flow decrees are still evoked, in order to have seasonal and timed entries. There is no reflection on Italian demography or on how the phenomenon has changed over the years.
Even the Democratic Party limits itself to saying a few things, it also talks about the abolition of the emergency reception system based on extraordinary reception centers (cas) but these are only words. Solo + Europa openly calls for the abolition of the memorandum with Libya and proposes to create an independent commission on human rights, while the third pole, formed by Italia Viva and + Action, advances the idea of a ministry of migration. No party has an overall, real, detailed vision. They all use the same tones and the same language. It is a film that has already been seen: migrants are not subjects with rights, but objects of propaganda ”.