The number of boats carrying migrants from North Africa across the Mediterranean It grew steadily last year, driven mainly by climate change. But Europe is reluctant to accept this new massive movement of people.
Today the launching pad for most migrants who undertake the risky journey across the Mediterranean Sea is Tunisia. In its improvised clandestine ports, hopes and dreams, as well as desperation, mix. “I just want to be a basketball player,” Mohammed Lain Barrie tells the BBC. He has traveled 5,000 kilometers from his home country of Sierra Leone. “I know it would be good. I want to do it for my family. My dream is to go to the United States to play basketball,” he says.
His face lights up as he speaks. However, just a few miles from the coast there is a reminder of the risks he, along with tens of thousands of others, are willing to take. Fishing nets lie on the bottom of the dock in the port of La Lusa. But too often the daily catch there includes corpses of migrants who perished when their poorly built and overloaded boats sank or capsized. However, there is no shortage of people willing to pay huge sums of money to get on those boats. Most of them head to Italy. So far this year more than 115,000 people have made the trip. That’s more than double the number of people who achieved it last year in the same period. The surge is largely made up of sub-Saharan Africans who are desperate to flee the continent.
Policies
Italy has a new right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloniwhich was elected on the promise of a “total naval blockade”: their version of the British promise Rishi Sunak to “stop the ships” that cross the English Channel from France: a country that takes an inclusive look at neighbors Spain and Italy, but applies border closures in the south.
In Sicily, where most of those who come from Africa land, Enrico Trantino, recently elected mayor of Catania, is a political ally of Meloni. Trantino assures that “it is hypocritical to expect that Sicily and Italy can cope alone with the current influx of refugees: It is impossible for them to come here and for everyone to have the support they need to have a better life.”
That was Meloni’s preaching at the summit that was called in the middle of this year to discuss the issue of migrant tsunami. There the prime minister, once rejected for having roots in the Italian extreme right, managed to impose her logic against the discursive humanitarianism of the northern countries that place all responsibility for containment on the Mediterranean. But things changed. Meloni is today accepted as part of “Team Europe”. This is how she was presented by the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, when she accompanied her on a recent trip to Tunisia. There the EU offered up to $2 billion in support to President Kais Saied if he helps stop the boats.
apartheid
This led to harsh policies and Saied was accused of incite racial hatred: Earlier this year he himself suggested that there was a conspiracy in his country to replace local Arabs with black Africans coming from Central Africa. And it is not only in the Mediterranean where anti-immigrant sentiment is stirring, which in different parts of Europe is denounced as apartheid.
In Germany, the far-right AfD party is on the rise. A recent poll puts them neck and neck with Chancellor Scholz’s ruling Social Democrats. And with elections approaching, that could change the country’s policy toward refugees.
Rosenheim, in the German state of Bavaria, a few kilometers from the border with Austria, is the first stop for many immigrants arriving in the country. In 2015, thousands of Syrian refugees took their first step onto German soil there. The country welcomed more than a million asylum seekers in that crisis. The local mayor, Andrea Marz, of the conservative CSU party, now says that with the queues for healthcare, daycare and housing it is easy to convince voters that immigrants are to blame.
The irony is that Europe – Italy and Germany in particular – needs more people, more workers. The government in Berlin is thinking about the previously unthinkable and is proposing that asylum seekers already in Germany – who are prohibited from working until their applications are processed – apply for a fast-track visa to process them. to the labor force and help solve “desperate” labor shortages.
But just as companies across Europe are clamoring for more workers, voters across Europe are putting pressure on their politicians to put their own people first. The Dutch government collapsed last week because the ruling coalition could not agree on new immigration restrictions, and the once super-liberal Scandinavian countries also adopted tough policies. Few are moved by the dreams that so many immigrants talk about, even when that prayer comes from Francis himself (see box). Sympathy for individual stories has not translated into a collective will to open Europe to those seeking asylum. Quite the opposite.
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