Source:
MeridioNews
Alberto Biondo has visited some extraordinary reception centers in the region's capital for Borderline: “The asylum seekers are frustrated by the bureaucracy. The reception system has no beginning and no end and is purposefully conceived in a way that leaves people hanging.”
Alberto Biondo has visited some extraordinary reception centers in the region's capital for Borderline: “The asylum seekers are frustrated by the bureaucracy. The reception system has no beginning and no end and is purposefully conceived in a way that leaves people hanging.”
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Photo: Alberto Biondo
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In
Palermo and the rest of the province, there are a little over ten
extraordinary reception centers. Set up in times of emergency to
compensate the lack of space in regular structures and provided
shelters, today they are, in contrast to their names, completely
integrated in the ordinary reception system for asylum seekers.
According to information that were given to Borderline, there are
between 450 and 500 migrants in these kinds of centers in the
region's capital. In these extraordinary reception centers there are
mainly those who have appealed their rejection of asylum. “It is
mainly people from Nigeria, Gambia, Senegal, but also some people
from Bangladesh. People who have applied for asylum before the hot
spot system was in place, whose application was rejected, and who are
now caught in a loop,” he tells Meridionews. In the context of his
monitoring work for Borderline, Alberto Biondo has visited centers of
which many are in counties of the province: Geraci Siculo, San
Giuseppe Jato, and Piana degli Albanesi, just to name a few of them.
Borderline's
work has served to investigate the system of reception “which
neither has a beginning nor an end,” says Biondo; it “is built
with the intention to leave those people hanging and to make them
invisible. It is this invisibility which leads to some people making
a profit in less than pleasant ways out of the migrants' being here:
those who let them work illegally on their fields, the mafia that
uses them as runners, and others who exploit them as male or female
prostitutes.“ The main issue? “To contain the frustration of
these young people with the long waiting times of bureaucracy. It
simply cannot be the case that a document which they were supposed to
get after two months takes up to two or three years to be issued.
Most people in Palermo's extraordinary reception centers stay there
for a long time. Some of them arrived in 2013 or 2014 and they are
still there. A person who has to work to send money back home cannot
be held back for months or years.”
The
extraordinary reception centers are of good structure, but often they
are far off of any lived-in areas, a situation which leads to many
problems: “It is impossible that there are centers in mountainous
regions that lack infrastructure and are hard to reach,” Biondo
explains. The prefecture legitimizes this decision with a lowered
risk for migrants to get in contact with criminal networks. On the
other hand, however, it is much harder to assimilate in these
isolated regions, not to mention the many problems in terms of
accessibility of authorities and service providers. Yet the
geographical position is not the only problem, others result from the
way job advertisements for leading positions in these centers are
phrased. These, according to Biondo, need to be revised: “Certain
job profiles need to be present in extraordinary reception centers at
all times. Yet, this is not accounted for in the prefecture's
guidelines. We noticed that some employees are present only a couple
of hours per week sometimes.”
However,
what can be done? Biondo has a clear vision: “The job
advertisements need to be adjusted to the real needs of the people.
We need to assign clear and constant responsibilities: psychologists,
lawyers, mediators for language and culture that have to be present
at all times. It is not possible that the employees are only used to
pacify the respective center. Often there are no mediators for
language and culture that are present at the center at all times,
instead they have to be requested. The biggest obstacle in
extraordinary reception centers,” Biondo explains, “are both the
cultural as well as verbal communication. Finally, we need to reduce
the number of residents for extraordinary reception centers. Twenty
people are already a lot, although we have experienced centers with
up to 80 inhabitants.”
Manlio Melluso
Translation: Annika Schadewaldt
