Giorgia Meloni is Offshoring Migration to Solve Italy’s Immigration Concerns; Now the Rest of Europe is Interested Too
On September 16, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer met with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in Rome for a meeting on immigration. Starmer, only recently appointed to his position in July, discussed how the United Kingdom could learn from Meloni’s policies and apply them domestically, as Italy has seen a 60 percent drop in arrivals by sea this year. Specifically, Starmer expressed interest in Meloni’s recent Albanian deal, which establishes an off-shore Italian jurisdiction on the Balkan coast to process migrants before they enter the country. While the UK’s immigration issues differ from Italy’s, Starmer’s interest highlights growing and unified support around the continent for new ways to tackle one of Europe’s biggest present challenges.
Meloni and right-wing candidates campaigned on being hard on immigration in the race for the Italian Prime Minister seat in 2022, capitalizing off of national frustration with the European refugee crisis and its disproportionate impact on Italy. Since the initial 2015-2016 refugee surge, exasperation with the inundation of migrants into the country has pushed politicians towards stoking an inflammatory, anti-immigrant sentiment. Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-right Lega Nord party and current Minister of Transport under Meloni, declared in 2018 that Italian ports were closed off to NGO-owned ships carrying migrants. Now, those comments are bringing consequences, as he faces a potential 6-year prison sentence for his decision to prevent the docking of a boat for over a month–one with more than 100 migrants aboard.
Despite running on such a platform, Meloni’s Italy saw nearly double the number of immigrant arrivals during her first year in office, prompting her to bolster internal security and to think outside her borders to tackle the issue. One such turning point was the arrival of over 10,000 migrants in a single week on the island of Lampedusa last September—a number nearly double Lampedusa's tiny population of around 6,000. The island, only around 100 kilometers off the coast of Tunisia, serves as an easy access point to the EU for migrants coming by sea. In response, Meloni pushed forward stricter measures through the Italian parliament. Now, authorities have been given permission to detain migrants for up to 18 months instead of just three, in the hope that this will provide enough time to process applications and aid with repatriation, if necessary. Additionally, further construction of holding centers was also approved.
With a majority of refugees arriving through North African routes, the EU, under pressure from Italy, has looked to extend its borders further south by sketching deals with both Libya and Tunisia to halt migrants. In 2017, Italy and the UN-backed Libyan government signed a Memorandum of Understanding that provided aid, funding, and training to the Libyan Coast Guard to intercept departing boats and return them to the mainland. Later that year, the EU signed The Malta Declaration with Libya in Malta, a similar program pledging further social support, training, equipment, improved detention centers, and €200 million in aid to the government in efforts to quell migrant flows. Both deals resulted in accusations of human rights abuses against migrants and were heavily criticized by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Meanwhile, the Tunisian deal, officially endorsed by the Commission last July, provides €1 billion to the Tunisian government to bolster border security on land and sea, along with benefits to local businesses and improvements to education. Meloni, a major initiator of the deal, and the EU hope the extra funds will encourage migrants to stay in Tunisia and not attempt the crossing. President of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, highlighted the need for “effective cooperation” between Tunisia and the EU to break the human smuggling industry, which was valued at just over €900 million euros last year. But Tunisian President Kais Saied later pushed back on the aid after signing, claiming that Tunisia would not accept any form of “charity.” While the issue was fixed last December, members of European Parliament have accused the EU of directing money to Saied rather than the specific project fund.
Despite the issues with both deals, the updated numbers from the Italian Interior Ministry prove to many that the policies are working as planned for the country. On the back of these successes, Meloni has begun to take a third-party approach to the issue as well, finalizing the plan with Albania last fall to finance holding centers for migrants across the Adriatic. The centers, which are constructed near an air force base in Gjadër and are under Italian jurisdiction, can hold up to 3,000 migrants who are waiting for their asylum applications to be processed. The Italian government hopes they can get through 36,000 applications a year if all works as planned. However, only those arriving from a set of 21 “safe countries,” including Tunisia, Egypt, and Bangladesh, are allowed to apply, meaning that a majority are likely to have their applications denied due to the narrower criteria. This has raised concerns about the difficulty of repatriation and overcrowding in the centers. While Albanian lawyers argued that the plan went against their constitutional rights, the new detention centers were approved for construction by a court back in January.
Albania has been in the process of joining the EU for the last decade, and while Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama pointed out that this deal was not a push for accession, Meloni highlighted Albania as “a friend of the European Union” after the agreement. She hopes that the directing of ships there will be an “extraordinary deterrence” to those looking to come to Italy, as Albania does not possess EU privileges or easy access to wealthier EU countries.
Even though those within the center are protected by the European Convention on Human Rights, the EU has no oversight to object to the program because Albania is not a formal member. However, von der Leyen lauded the project, calling it “out-of-the-box-thinking” in a letter to EU member states after the deal was signed. While PM Rama has made it clear that this project is solely between Italy and Albania, other EU countries have been eyeing the scheme and looking for ways to do the same.
In mid-May, the EU finally passed its migration regulations in the New Pact for Migration and Asylum, and while the pact had been on the workbench since the 2015 refugee crisis, it arrived at a time when this issue has continued to impact the continent. A main aspect of the pact included a reformation of the Dublin Regulation, which stipulated that migrants would have to register at the first EU country they land in, skewing backlogs to the south. Now, countries hope that through a solidarity mechanism and better relations with countries along migratory routes, applications will not take so long to process. Despite dissent from Hungary and Poland, the act provides a substantial argument that the EU is looking to even the spread of immigration throughout the Union, aiding southern states like Italy in the process.
Two days after the momentous passing of the pact, 15 member states, including Italy, signed a letter calling for an increase in the outsourcing of migration policy, echoing Italy’s in-progress deal with Albania as well as the Memorandums of Understanding signed with Libya and Tunisia. It expressed the need for the creation of “constructive and broad partnerships with key countries, especially along the migratory routes” and the necessity of politicians to “think outside the box.” Building on top of the legal framework presented by the pact, the signatories suggested utilizing third-party type countries to host refugees in the process of repatriation–a process with which the EU has struggled. With such a high percentage of member state signatories, it is likely to find a place in the immigration agenda of the newly-elected EU parliament.
Despite the excitement across the continent, human rights groups and NGOs have pushed back against the slew of celebrated deals Italy has worked on, emphasizing reports of torture, denial of rights, and even deaths of migrants. A report in The Guardian detailed incredibly high numbers of rape, sexual assault, and torture of refugees by Tunisian guards funded by EU and Italian money, while Amnesty International called Italy complicit in the torture of refugees after they renewed their pact with Libya in 2020. Back in June, Judith Sunderland of Human Rights Watch called Meloni’s Albania plan a “blueprint for abuse,” emphasizing that the offshoring of immigration processes does little to ensure the humane and legal treatment of every asylum seeker.
With migratory routes routinely spanning the Mediterranean and into Italian territory, it is increasingly easy to understand the EU’s reflective action on Italy’s migration policies. Meloni’s approach is different from what has been tried in the past, and the EU hopes to ride on that predicted success, applying it on a country-by-country basis, even if it only actually deflects the issue to other nations. As global struggles continue to displace populations, it is clear that the European migration crisis will not be ending soon. Whether Italy and the EU will continue to treat it as if it will remains to be seen.