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Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni assured Parliament Tuesday her government would rein in the country’s chaotic immigration situation and restore order and legality to migratory flows.
In a policy statement ahead of a confidence vote in her new government, Meloni told the Chamber of Deputies that security and legality are tied to the correct management of immigration, summed up in a simple principle: “in Italy, as in any other serious state, you do not enter illegally.”
Meloni pointed to the many casualties of unregulated migration caused by the country’s past inability to secure its borders.
“In these years of terrible inability to find the right solutions to the various migration crises, too many men, women, and children have met their deaths at sea trying to get to Italy,” declared Italy’s first female prime minister. “Too many times we have said ‘never again,’ only to have to repeat it again and again.”
The total number of migrant sea deaths reached its highest point in 2016 under the leadership of leftist Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, with 4,578 migrants declared either dead or missing.
At that time, Professor Anna Bono, who teaches African History and Institutions at the University of Turin, noted that most of the migrants coming to Italy were not refugees escaping from war or even poor people fleeing hunger, but young, middle-class males.
Traffickers in African countries have vigorously promoted emigration to Italy through extensive propaganda campaigns, she asserted.
In 2018, thanks to policies enacted by interior minister Matteo Salvini to curb unregulated immigration, the number of migrant deaths in the central Mediterranean Sea plummeted by more than 50 percent over the previous year, falling from 2,258 to just 1,058 in the same six-month period.
In Tuesday’s address, Meloni said her government will pursue a path of halting illegal departures from North Africa, “finally breaking the trafficking of human beings in the Mediterranean.”
“We intend to propose it at European level and implement it in agreement with the authorities of North Africa,” Meloni said, “accompanied by the creation of hotspots in African territories, managed by international organizations, to examine asylum requests and discern who has the right to be welcomed in Europe and who does not have that right.”
“We do not intend in any way to question the right to asylum for those fleeing war and persecution,” the prime minister insisted. “Our goal is to prevent traffickers from being the ones to decide who will immigrate into Italy.”
Meloni also said her government intends to directly address “the causes that lead migrants, especially the youngest, to abandon their land, their cultural roots, and their family to seek a better life in Europe.”
The introduction of “a virtuous model of collaboration and growth between the European Union and African nations will also serve to counter the worrying spread of Islamist radicalism, especially in the sub-Saharan area,” she noted.