The small island of Lampedusa, located south of Italy, in the central Mediterranean Sea, is the scene of a serious humanitarian crisis, involving the arrival of immigrants.
In recent months, the place has received a record number of illegal immigrants, most of them Africans, who see the island as their only opportunity to enter Europe and find permanent refuge on the continent.
Lampedusa is 145 kilometers from the nearest coast of Tunisia, a country located in North Africa. Tunisia has currently been one of the main exit points for many illegal immigrants who pay for precarious crossings across the Mediterranean Sea to the European continent.
Currently, the Italian island officially has around 6,300 inhabitants and only one reception center for immigrants with a total capacity for just 400 people.
This is precisely what has made the migration crisis in Lampedusa even more worrying, as the number of immigrants arriving on the island already exceeds the total number of inhabitants and there are no longer places to accommodate so many people.
Approximately 1,850 new immigrants landed on Lampedusa last Wednesday alone (13), which brought the total number of immigrants on the island to more than 6,700 people, reported the Italian news agency Loop.
Before that, on Tuesday (12), Italian prosecutor Giovanni Di Leo had informed reporters that an impressive record had occurred in Lampedusa, with the arrival of 112 vessels carrying more than 5,000 immigrants. This number significantly surpassed the previous record, set in August, when 63 boats brought more than 2,000 immigrants to the island.
With the arrival of these immigrants, the population of Lampedusa, which previously was only 6,300, more than doubled in just two days.
Images recorded by Italian media on Tuesday showed several rows of fragile boats, packed with people, all waiting to dock at the port of Lampedusa and be received by authorities.
Most people who arrive on the island are broke, tired and hungry. Some suffer from severe malnutrition.
In the midst of this crisis, a baby just five months old drowned and died on Wednesday during a rescue operation by the Italian Coast Guard. The baby, who was with his mother, a teenager from Guinea whose name has not been released, fell into the sea while the boat they were on was being towed by the rescue team to the coast of the Italian island.
All the other immigrants who were on the boat where the tragedy occurred left the Tunisian city of Sfax, which has been the current starting point for many sea journeys to Europe.
Flavio Di Giacomo, spokesman for the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration (IOM), said on Wednesday that the much shorter journey from Tunisia is encouraging more attempted illegal crossings into the mainland. European.
Often, these crossings are made with smaller vessels in precarious condition, which ends up making rescue operations even more complicated.
“What is happening in Lampedusa is that, for the first time, the Tunisian route has become very busy, and it is difficult to manage [essa rota] compared to the Libyan route,” said Di Giacomo.
Around 123,860 immigrants have arrived in Italy since the beginning of 2023, according to data from the country’s Ministry of the Interior. This number is practically double what was recorded in the same period in 2022.
If the volume of illegal arrivals continues at the current rate, the numbers could reach the immigration peak recorded in 2016, when more than 181,000 illegal immigrants arrived in Italy via the Mediterranean Sea.
From January to August 2016, there were around 115,000 landings in the country, compared to the 114,526 registered in the same period now in 2023.
Filippo Mannino, mayor of Lampedusa, told the news agency Adnkronos on Wednesday (13) that everyone on the island wants to help, but the volume of work has left volunteers and people trying to welcome immigrants exhausted.
“We are all tired and exhausted, physically and psychologically. The situation is becoming uncontrollable and unsustainable,” he said.
The economic and social conditions that are only getting worse in Tunisia and other African countries contribute even more to the uncontrolled increase in immigration to the Italian island.
In an attempt to mitigate the situation in Lampedusa, a considerable number of immigrants arriving there are periodically relocated by the Italian authorities to Sicily.
However, this transfer does not happen with the desired speed when arrivals occur in large volumes, as has been happening in recent days.
Because of this, many people end up without a place to stay, which makes their distribution on the island even more complicated.
Francesca Basile, head of migration at the Italian Red Cross, said on Thursday (14) that the situation in Lampedusa at the moment is “certainly complex” and that “gradually, we are trying to return to normality”.
Basile also stated that “despite the critical situation, we still try to distribute beds to people in order to prevent them from sleeping in the open.”
Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Antonio Tajani, wrote this week on his X account (new Twitter name) that the Italian government will do “whatever is necessary to help the residents of Lampedusa and migrants who continue to arrive on the island”.
For her part, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said on Monday (11) that she was convening a ministerial panel on national security with the aim of improving her government’s response to the increase in arrivals of illegal immigrants to the country. .
“Our goal is to approach the problem pragmatically, with quick and coordinated decisions,” she said.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres told reporters on Wednesday that the immigration problem in Lampedusa “does not just concern the countries receiving this influx [de imigração]is a problem for the European continent and, in particular, for the European Union”.
For Guterres, other countries in the bloc should try to help the Italian government in this time of crisis.
“There must be solidarity and burden-sharing mechanisms that are effective in this sense,” he stated.
Escapes from war and racism in North Africa
The repression of immigrants in Tunisia and the ongoing chaos in Libya, which is currently facing a tragic situation after floods resulting from a storm killed more than 11 thousand people in the country, are among the main factors that have driven this immigration crisis in Lampedusa.
The majority of immigrants who move to the Italian island say they come from Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Chad, Tunisia, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Cameroon and Libya.
They report having paid around 5,000 Tunisian dinars (approximately R$7,900 at current exchange rates) each for the human smugglers’ transportation services.
These smugglers often deceive immigrants, promising a smooth crossing of the Mediterranean Sea in vessels unsuitable for transporting people.
Adhering to the idea of a safe passage, but deep down knowing the risks, these immigrants face the dangerous crossing, with the dream of reaching the other side and finally starting their search for a better life in Europe.
According to the IOM, at least 2,013 people have lost their lives or gone missing so far this year while trying to cross the Central Mediterranean Sea in precarious and dangerous conditions.
In June of this year, a sad event shocked the world, when a single shipwreck in the Eastern Mediterranean took the lives of at least 82 immigrants who wanted to reach Greece. This tragedy represented one of the deadliest events involving immigrants in the region and highlights once again the gravity of the situation.
The increase in sea crossings from North Africa is also a worrying symptom of the lack of security and stability on the continent.
Africa has been the scene of several coups d’état and sees the number of people living in a state of social vulnerability growing every year.
In Italy, the only approach that the country’s authorities have adopted to alleviate the overload at the Lampedusa reception center is to transfer immigrants to other regions of the country.
Recently, the European website Euronews he spoke to some of the newcomers to Lampedusa, who were on board a ferry bound for the Sicilian city of Porto Empedocle.
The majority of those on board the ferry, according to the report, were immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa, who fled Tunisia due to a series of racist attacks directed against black Africans residing in that country.
Two African women, one originally from Côte d’Ivoire and the other from Burkina Faso, decided to talk about their decisions to leave the African continent.
A Euronews, the Ivorian anonymously stated that “Tunisian people didn’t want to see us there. They didn’t like us, we didn’t feel welcome. That’s why we left. I wasn’t deported to the desert. My friends went. We know people died there,” she said.
The other woman stated, also anonymously, that she left Burkina Faso because of the war. She said that she even tried to live in Tunisia, but the racism of the local population made her change her mind; That’s why she decided to move to Italy.
“I couldn’t stand to stay there. [na
Tunísia]. It was very difficult because they don’t like black people,” she said.
One of the immigrants who spoke to the European website said that they are being well received on the island of Lampedusa, despite the lack of accommodation and serious problems in living.
“There is a lot of solidarity here among the locals. They [a população de Lampedusa] they deserve the Nobel Peace Prize,” he said.
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