Mayors are sounding the alarm in southern Italy: reception centers for refugees are overcrowded, and there is growing resentment in the population. Other Mediterranean states also report rising numbers of refugees.
There is a lot of anger among local mayors aimed at the Italian government at the moment. They are reporting unbearable heat and cramped conditions in refugee camps that are too small and overcrowded — and are demanding a ban on new admissions in their municipalities.
More than 13,000 migrants have come to Italy this year via the Mediterranean Sea, which is about 9,000 more than in the same period last year. According to the UN Refugee Agency, many people embarked on the perilous journey in July, when the waters were relatively calm.
The local mood is tipping
Felix Weiss of the Sea Watch refugee rescue organization recently returned to Germany from a several-week aerial reconnaissance mission on Lampedusa. He has reported that the mood on the island is threatening to deteriorate: “The situation on Lampedusa is extremely tense. In the past months, almost 5,500 people have reached the island on their own. That is two or three boats a day.”
The German volunteers have not yet registered any attacks, but recently two smaller shipyards, where the migrants’ wooden boats are often stored, were set on fire — and Weiss also senses a changed mood among the population, which used to be open-minded towards the migrants.
According to the sea rescuers, the coronavirus outbreak has increased economic pressure on the local population. Tourism, the main driver of the island’s economy, has collapsed. There are fewer than half of the visitors than in normal years are currently on the island, Weiss estimated. If, as happened recently, wooden boats with migrants land on the tourist beaches, the situation would become even more difficult.
Under these circumstances, offers of support from Rome meet with little response. The government wants to send a quarantine ship to the port of the Sicilian municipality of Porto Empedocle. The Interior Ministry thinks asylum-seekers could go into quarantine there. But the mayor of the small port town has refused, fearing a risk to the vital tourism sector.
Recently there have been many problems with coronavirus prevention in the refugee accommodations. Hundreds of migrants have secretly chosen to leave the camps in violation the quarantine regulations. Even so, a major coronavirus outbreak has not occurred.
Meanwhile, the head of the right-wing populist party Lega, Matteo Salvini, is trying to make political capital out of the situation. During a visit to Lampedusa a week ago, the former interior minister, who while in office endeavored to keep migrants from Italy’s shores, blamed the increasing number of newly arriving migrants for the poor situation of tourism and fishermen on the island.
Salvini, who was celebrated by numerous supporters on Lampedusa, in speeches and on Twitter repeatedly called for a stop to the “invasion” and questioned the need to help migrants at all. At present, the new arrivals on Lampedusa are mainly from Tunisia, which has been badly hit economically by the pandemic….
