in Lampedusa, the inhabitants are indignant at the migration policy of the Italian government

In front of the church of Lampedusa, Enzo, a fisherman from father to son, will play the role of Saint Peter during the Easter Stations of the Cross. The man, engaged on land and sea, sees his island change on the issue of migrants:. “We no longer welcome as we should, I must say that everything has changed. We can no longer interact with them, because they have become numbers, that’s the truth!

“I can’t receive them at my house, because now they are not allowed to leave the center. Before, my house was always open, every day!”

Enzo, fisherman in Lampedusa

at franceinfo

In the morning, the migrants are transferred, crammed into dispatch riders, from the center to the ferry that will take them to Sicily. Lined up along the quay, watched by the carabinieri, no one can talk to them. From a distance, a young Tunisian refugee waves his hand when asked how he is, as if to answer “AVERAGE”.

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According to official Italian figures, more than 32,000 migrants, including 18,000 Tunisians, arrived in Italy illegally from Tunisia in 2022. Most arrive at the port of Lampedusa, since it is less than 150 kilometers from the Tunisian coast .

The Italian right embarrassed

Lampedusa’s former left-wing mayor, Salvatore Martello, calls the government blind and incompetent when he says he wants to hunt smugglers around the world. “Here, in a single day, there can be 30 boats arriving without a single ferryman”he says. “They put people in the boats, turn on the engine and say ‘go ahead, straight ahead’! It’s like when this government says that there are fewer deaths in the Mediterranean, it’s not true, because no one controls the Mediterranean anymore.”

“Fishermen see corpses floating around and of which we know nothing: so how can we say that there are fewer deaths than before!”

Salvatore Martello, former mayor of Lampedusa

at franceinfo

The current mayor, Filippo Mannino, is absent, his League deputy is not responding either, two deputies from Fratelli d’Italia were announced, but have officially given up the trip due to the weather. In Lampedusa, right-wing politicians do not speak.

But Matteo Salvini, the vice-president of the Italian Council of Ministers, now believes that refugee centers should be created throughout the country: “We arrest a lot of illegal migrants who commit crimes and misdemeanors, but we don’t have structures that allow them to be kept in time to identify them and deport them. So having a repatriation center in each region would of course be useful. to manage the phenomenon!”

Because so far, the Italian government has not succeeded in preventing the departure of refugees from the Libyan and Tunisian coasts.