“The NGO workers who are tasked with getting the people off these rickety boats in the middle of the sea have terrible stories to tell.
When a boat is spotted at any time of the day or night and the workers are not on an official vessel, they have an hour or two at most to get down to the harbour. One worker says that when the migrants board the naval vessel at sea, or the harbour on land, they are told ‘You’re in Italy!’
Then the workers reassure them that they are safe. Again, apart from the Eritreans most are very happy and smile. In the countries they come from, people are suspicious of officials and especially of police, so for third parties to reassure the migrants that here in Europe the police and officials will actually work for them is a very important reassurance. One NGO worker relates that the first thing she says to the migrants when they get onto the naval vessel in the middle of the sea or into the dock at Lampedusa is simply, ‘Welcome to Europe.’
After what the migrants have been through even before the treacherous crossing from North Africa, it is hardly surprising that many of them arrive at Lampedusa exhausted and traumatised. Some will have lost a family member on the journey.
In 2015 a big Nigerian man sat on the harbour ground weeping like a child and hitting it with his hand. The boat he had come in on had gone down and though he had saved one of his children, his wife and another of his sons had drowned in front of him.
Yet still they come, knowing the risks, because for all the stories of sinking boats and deaths on board, most of those who set out will stay afloat, reach Italian waters and once there become European citizens. Whether they are fleeing political, religious or sectarian persecution, or whether they are after a better life in the Developed World, ALL will claim Asylum.
Many will have legitimate claims and Italy has a duty to give these people asylum: under the Geneva Conventions and the EU Dublin Treaty the first country into which a migrant enters and claims asylum is the country that must assess the claim and offer protection.
But the bitter Truth is that there is almost no way to find out Who is Who, or What is True.
If the flow of applicants was not at the levels it has been for years then the finger-printing, interviews and everything else that follows could be carefully assessed. Backstories could be cross-checked and followed up on. But with the arrivals coming at this speed and in these numbers there was never any chance of this.
Two other elements make all of this far worse. Many – and sometimes most – of the people arriving deliberately bring no paperwork with them because being unidentified is an advantage.
[ In a civilised Society, they cannot deport you, repatriate you, try you, jail you or execute you when They don't know Who You Are -- ]
Amid the demands on the time of the agencies people can pretend to be other ages, other people or even from another country.
When it became known that a particular group were being put to the front of the asylum queue – Syrians, for instance – then a large number of people would claim to be Syrians, even though some of those working with the refugees noticed they were neither speaking any Syrian dialect nor knew anything about the country they claimed to be from.
This phenomenon is at least partly caused by NGOs that advocate for any and all migration into Europe as part of the ‘borderless world’ movement. As the flow of migrants grew in the 2010s, some NGO groups decided to help migrants before they even got to Europe. They provided easily accessible information on the web and on phone apps to guide would-be Europeans through the process. This included advice on where to go and what to say once there.
Front-line workers notice that as time goes on the awareness of the migrants about what will happen to them and what they should expect becomes ever clearer. In part this is the result of word filtering back to their countries of origin from people who have successfully made the journey. But it is also because a movement exists that seeks to teach migrants how to stay in Europe whatever the justice of their application. All these groups are correct in their assumption that in the twenty-first century Italy has neither the money, time nor will to painstakingly go through every application.
Of course, there are people who are refused asylum, at which point they can appeal the decision. But even if their appeal is turned down it is rare for anything further to happen. It is hard to find any cases of someone arriving in Italy, being refused the right to remain and then being sent back to their home country. Very occasionally someone who has been convicted of a crime in Italy is repatriated. But even then the bar is set exceptionally high. It is easier to let everyone dissolve into Italy and then into Europe than it is to hold the line of the law. The Truth is that once you survive Lampedusa’s waters you are in Europe for good.
Of course, even those who may be lying about asylum are looking for an infinitely better life than the one they have left behind.
From Lampedusa it seems easy to imagine schemes to distribute this vast and continual wave of people equitably and harmoniously across the continent. But anybody who knows even just Italy should know better than this. Aside from the tiny number of earlier and better-off migrants, most people who arrive will eventually find themselves sleeping outside the train station in Milan or in a car park in Ravenna. The lucky ones will end up working for gangs or trying to sell imitation luxury goods on the bridges of Venice or down the side streets of Naples. Whenever they see a policeman or the flash of a police car’s lights they will hurriedly gather up their counterfeit bags or wheel away their tray of imitation-brand sunglasses and hurry from the scene.
They may be more protected, free and safe than they were at home, but their future can hardly be said to be bright.
And Lampedusa is only one small island. During recent years boats full of migrants have also come ashore on the islands nearest to Lampedusa, including Malta and Sicily. In 2014 alone – the year before the migrant crisis ‘began’ – 170,000 people arrived this way.
Officials talk of solving the problem by filling Libya’s recent government vacuum. But they forget that the flow of migrants continued even during the period when European governments (including the French) were paying bribes to Gaddafi. And they forget that the boats do not only head out from Libya, but also launch from Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria.
What is more, this is in any case only one route.
Over to the west of the Mediterranean is another route entirely, going up from Morocco and into Spain. Migrants have flowed across this narrowest gap between Africa and Europe, the Straits of Gibraltar, for decades. And despite Morocco having the best relations of any North African government with any European country – and therefore the best chance of doing deals to stop the smugglers – the migration to Spain has not been stopped.
Indeed, during the early 1990s the movement of migrants through this route proved to be a harbinger of what was to come. In those days the going rate for the people-smugglers to traverse 10 miles of sea was $600. Then as now boats set off on a daily basis and the bodies of those who didn’t make it (often because the smugglers make migrants swim the last portion of the journey) washed up on the beaches of Spain.
Then, as now, the movement was not only continuous but diverse. One report from 1992 documented that of 1,547 illegal migrants detained by the Spanish authorities in Tarifa alone over a ten-month period, there were 258 Ethiopians, 193 Liberians and 64 Somalis.
As the report observed, ‘word of the new route had spread far beyond Morocco, with not only Algerians and growing numbers of sub-Saharan Africans, but also Filipinos, Chinese and even the occasional Eastern Europeans among those detained’. Among those who were fleeing, some were escaping oppression while others were simply looking for work or a better quality of life.
As Santiago Varela, Spain’s then Deputy Interior Minister, said, ‘In North Africa, there is a structural problem. We don’t know how its political and economic situation will develop. And the demographic pressure is enormous.’ He was referring to a situation in which even then 70 per cent of the Moroccan population was under the age of 30 and official unemployment figures sat at 17.5 per cent. ‘You can’t yet compare our problem with that of other European countries,’ Varela said. ‘But it’s a warning of what can happen here in the future. Spain has passed very quickly from being a land of emigration to one of immigration.’
Varela was speaking after a period in which North Africans who had previously headed towards France and Belgium were instead looking to find jobs in Italy and Spain at a time when neither country required visas. The migrants could enter either country as tourists and then travel on to the rest of Europe. And part of the pull factor even then was Europe’s commitment to lower the internal borders between countries, making free movement easy once anyone was in Europe.
In the 1990s efforts to clamp down on illegal entries were hampered by Morocco’s refusal to take back any non-Moroccans who had left the country. Thus, as one Spanish official noted, even if the government did manage to deter boats in his region, ‘They’ll find other ways of getting in. They’ll use bigger boats and land away from here. They’ll try Italy or Portugal. While there’s so much misery over there, they’ll keep coming.’
Although efforts to stem the flow of migrants has been more successful in Spain than in Italy or Greece, the flow still continues today. In the 2010s it is concentrated on the Spanish North African enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta, which remain tantalising positions for anyone seeking to make their way into Europe. Regular efforts by migrants to break down the fences and walls surrounding the enclaves mean clashes with police and frequent unrest. At the same time – and powerful though the pressures of those enclaves remain, the migrant boats still continue to head for the Spanish mainland or tiny pieces of territory like the islet of Alboran. In December 2014 in bad seas one boat of more than fifty sub-Saharan Africans headed off from near Nador in northern Morocco to the southern coast of Spain.
The Cameroonian Muslim captain blamed the bad weather on a Nigerian Christian pastor who was praying on board. The captain and crew beat the pastor and threw him overboard before searching the other passengers, identifying the Christians, then beating and throwing them overboard in the same manner. This is only one more major route – one that has existed for years and where once again nothing is new but the scale. It was to this other side of the Mediterranean that the world’s attention turned in the crucial year of the crisis.
