It gets hot in Catania, Italy in June. The most immediate need of the disembarking boat people is for flip-flops, so that the ground doesn’t singe their feet.
They arrive shoeless and thirsty, yet often clutching the smartphones that made their odysseys possible, allowing them to transfer the credit and information needed to cross the Sahara and the Mediterranean.
This time three years ago, I was volunteering in a Catanian hostel for underage migrants. Nearly half a million sans-papiers arrived in 2015, met day after day by Italian Red Cross volunteers whose brisk and practical cheerfulness struck me as almost literally saintly. The numbers dipped in the following two years, and now seem to be rising again. Italy, though, has been utterly transformed in the meantime.
The new governing coalition in Rome is an alliance of opposites, but its constituent right- and left-wing parties agree on one thing. As the leader of the nationalist Lega, and now the interior minister, Matteo Salvini, puts it, “The good times for illegals are over. Get ready to pack your bags”.
True to his word, Salvini turned away a Franco-German ship, the Aquarius, which had been boarding migrants off the Libyan coast and depositing them in Sicily. There was outrage from European newspapers and politicians. Emmanuel Macron accused Italy of “cynicism and irresponsibility,” while Spain’s newly formed socialist government promised to take in the 629 people on board the Aquarius.
Yet there is no evidence that the French or Spanish people are any more enthusiastic about immigration than the Italians. The argument is not between France and Italy, so much as between Euro-politicians of the Macron stripe and the bulk of their populations. Italy is the European outlier, in the sense that its politicians reflect the views of their constituents.
I cast my mind back to my conversations in that migrant hostel in Catania. The boys there had come largely from West Africa. They were resourceful, ambitious kids who had done what I hope I’d be brave enough to do in their situation. But they were not refugees. They were fleeing poverty and corruption, not war, oppression or persecution. Nor were they in any conceivable sense victims of Western policy. If we ever bombed their countries, it was only with aid money, not munitions.
Their smartphones were the key to understanding the mass movement of people, the Völkerwanderung, that the world is undergoing. Some migrants are refugees, fleeing from Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan. But many more are looking, as people have always looked, for economic opportunities. Smartphones bring those opportunities within their grasp, enabling them to make journeys that their parents, living on subsistence agriculture, could not have contemplated.
Mass migration is not a response to falling living standards, as broadcasters like to claim; it is a consequence of rising living standards. A sudden outbreak of peace in Syria would not stop Gambians boarding rickety rafts in Libya.
There are legitimate arguments about how wealthy countries should deal with migratory pressure. How do you decide who gets in? Is compassion the key consideration, or economic utility? What is the right number? What to do with those who don’t make the cut? None of these questions are easy.
One thing, though, is unarguable. The current system is nearly the worst imaginable. The sea-route to Europe is the result of a legal anomaly. At land borders, states can turn away people who have no right to enter their territory. But maritime law obliges them to pick up endangered sea travelers and land them in the nearest safe harbor. Various NGOs interpret that law as entitling them to scoop people up just outside Libya’s ports and ferry them to Italy, where they can make their way to Germany or Sweden.
And that legal anomaly condemns thousands of people to drown every year. There is no pretense of admitting applicants on the basis of either need or due process. Immigration policy is contracted out to gangsters and human traffickers.
Can anything be done? Ask the Australians. The conservative government there, notably under Tony Abbott, declared that no migrant boats would be allowed to reach Australia. Vessels were intercepted by the navy and escorted to offshore processing centers where genuine refugees could make their claims. Result? No more boats and no more drownings. Indeed, the European migration crisis was partly a result of the Australian route being closed.
A similar approach — perhaps establishing safe and humane centers in Tunisia — seems to be beyond the EU. So the current dystopian policy continues, its flaws obvious but unmentionable in political circles. No wonder Italians have had enough.
