Landings at Agrigento and Palermo: “Where is my husband? Please help me!”

Last Saturday (June 25^th), the Coast Guard ship “Diciotti” disembarked 886 people at Palermo, including around 150 women, many of them very young, and 96 minors. These Nigerians, Ivorians, Guineans and Senegalese set foot in the Sicilian capital only for a few hours. Around 13 Eritreans were present, including 3 young women who were taken for adults, despite the specific information provided by workers from the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

The "Diciotti" - Ph. Alberto Biondo

The Parliamentary Commission Fails The Pozzallo Hotspot: New Minors Accepted Yesterday

On June 23^rd the parliamentary commission for the inquest into migrants visited the Hotspot of Pozzallo, in order to investigate the reception centre given over to official identification. The inspection revealed a critical and concerning situation within the centre: structural inadequacies, problems with the water supply, violations and privacy and prolonged detention of unaccompanied minors. Major “attention” is given over only to the identification procedures, perfectly in line with the logic of the Hotspot approach.

The CARA* at Mineo once again at the centre of investigations. And the numbers present continue to rise.

The investigations into the CARA* at Mineo, within the remit of “Mafia Capitale”, is producing new subpoenas for fraudulent misrepresentation and serious fraud, including the falsification of the number of migrants at the centre. The number has continued to rise in recent weeks, with new transfers following on from the disembarkings, not only at the ports of Catania and Augusta, but also Pozzallo, Trapani and Reggio Calabria. At the time of writing, the building houses around 3,500 people and explicitly carries out all the identification and selection procedures pertaining to the Hotspot approach, and seems also to be used as a Hub, given recent mass transferrals of Eritreans who have been agreed to relocation. It is thus simultaneous a location under investigation and also entrusted with a range of new functions, occurrences not only with no clear juridical regulation but, above all, even without pertaining to the duty of protecting migrants' rights. It is a ghetto in the middle of nowhere, outside of which, week after week, the army and police forces multiply.

Western Sicily: A Week of Hell

Over the week just gone, our attention has turned not only to the landings at Palermo, Porto Empedocle, Trapani and back to Porto Empedocle again, but also to the number of requests for help from the provinces of western Sicily, a place interesting not only for its high climatic temperatures but also the neglect, abandonment and desperation which makes migrants' stay in Italy a living hell.

Foto: Alberto Biondo

Minors in the Pozzallo Hotspot. On the “unwelcoming” road.

“I arrived a month ago, after having been in Sudan and for months in Libya. On arrival I was locked in a large room with hundreds of other people, many of them my age, others older. There were also women and children. They gave me a change of clothes and a telephone card, saying that soon I would be transferred to a centre for minors. A month passed and I'm still here.” This is the story of 'Y', a 16-years-old Eritrean man, describing the reality experienced by hundreds of minors detained like him in an illegitimate way for weeks or even months within the Hotspot at Pozzallo. Dozens of minors who arrived in the nearby port have been housed without recognition of their age, in conditions of overcrowding and psychological stress within the centre, and without having received and personal assistance.

Migrant crisis? The Italian hotspot approach is not a solution, but it has been politically effective

Alessio D'angelo - MA Migration, Society and Policy Programme Leader Dr Alessio D’Angelo is a member of the Middlesex team working on ‘EVI-MED – Constructing an Evidence Base of Mediterranean Migrations’, an ESRC-DFID project. In his latest blog post, he reports from Sicily where the ‘hotspot approach’ has dramatically altered the landscape of Italy’s migrant crisis.

Over the last few months the so-called migrant crisis in the Mediterranean has been described in terms of ‘chaos’. These or related terms have been used with particular regard to the situation in Greece, which – according to the official statistics – saw nearly one million sea arrivals between January 2015 and January 2016. The ‘chaos’, however, is not in the numbers.

The CPSA at Pozzallo becomes a Hotspot.

On Tuesday it was officially announced that the CPSA at Pozzallo has been transformed into a Hotspot, the third in Sicily. Inside, the Italian police will be supported by officials from Frontex, EASO and EUROPOL, while the management of the services is still being left to the cooperative Azione Sociale, as the a winner of the three-year contract, the tendering competition of which has been open for some months, has yet to chosen. The Hotspots are the result of European political decisions made in the remit of the relocation agreements, and are presented as a definitive arrangement for differentiating between economic migrants and asylum seekers.

Fortress Europe's Revolving Doors

The image which comes to mind so often at the moment is that of a hotel's revolving door, the kind in which children play endlessly, and when they do finally emerge from all the spinning end up back where they started, but with a dizzy head. 

For migrants, it's the same thing but with dramatic consequences: in the moment in which they're saved by a merchant vessel, a navy ship or volunteers, migrants step into this revolving door, but as soon as they touch Italian soil they begin to understand that it is no game, and that the door will set them down where they started, but in a worse state.

Let’s reject everyone or even better, let's not!

 “If we hadn't seen it with our own eyes, it would have been difficult to believe what Italy is doing. We are producing “illegal immigrants”, and entirely consciously. A human being, one who has just arrived after a journey across the desert, Libya and the sea, has been rejected with a piece of paper whose meaning he doesn’t even understand, but which actually condemns him to irregularity since the moment of his entering the country. This is an individual who has been deprived of every possibility of a real life. Italy is following “orders” coming from Europe and doesn’t realize that the only way to move beyond this, for their sake and for its own, is to give them leave to remain, a travel document, and to let these people enter Europe with their heads held high. We should drape them in legality! Instead of throwing them onto the streets, as they've been doing around here for some months now.”

Fortunately 2015 ended

The numbers of 2015 are horrible, they recall homicides, daily deaths that did not seem to end, fostered by policies that have not been corrected even when confronted with racism and the deaths of children.

931 - 237 - 150 - 200 - 73 are only the numbers of the latest arrivals – of minors, of Moroccan citizens, of migrants withhold at the new hotspot of Trapani and of those who demonstrated for days in Agrigento. 

Numbers and facts which reveal that the year 2015 ended exactly as it started, in total confusion, with the indifference of institutions and through the intervention of volunteers and activists who allow this system to still remain into place instead of crumbling.

Hotspot and deferred refusals: the Lampedusa-model

In Agrigento, the situation regarding “refoulement” and expulsion of asylum seekers is getting worryingly high. Since September, the Agrigento Police Station (Questura) has been issuing deferred decisions on refusal of entry towards migrants coming from Gambia, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Nigeria, Ghana, Pakistan, Somalia, Eritrea, Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt.

The reasons are different. Generally, as confirmed by the vice Prefect in a meeting held in Agrigento on December, 3rd, the migrants who are not part of the reception system because of lack of capacity in accommodation centres, have been rejected without getting any information regarding the procedures for the recognition of international protection. Moreover, the deferred refusals are systematically notified to citizens coming from North African countries. 

The truth about the Hotspot policy – violations and illegal actions on Lampedusa island

In the last couple of weeks, dozens of people coming from Mali, Gambia, Pakistan, Somalia, Eritrea and Nigeria, have arrived in Palermo as well as in Catania and other Sicilian cities. In their hands a decree of deportation, which orders them to leave Italy within seven days via Rome Fiumincino airport. All these people first arrived in Lampedusa, where they have been brought after having been intercepted in the Mediterranean Sea. 

Those migrants were not given the right to ask for international protection, although they have been in contact with the UNHCR. 

Immigrants, hotspot opens in Trapani

Giornale di Sicilia – The second Italian “hotspot” opens in Trapani and is a centre for identification and first assistance to immigrants (the first one is on Lampedusa). This has been communicated by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi who indicated, “the government keeps its commitments”. The hotspot of Trapani will be situated in a compound in the suburb Milo, at the margins of the city, where the Cie* has already been functioning for some time, hosting the majority of immigrants (about 120 at the moment) awaiting to be repatriated and who are currently being transferred to other cities in order to allow the opening of the new type of facility.

New landings at Augusta and Pozzallo

Migrants’ journey has not ended yet. Last week-end about 940 migrants were rescued offshore Sicily, in eight different operations. 258 of them arrived at Augusta’s port onboard of Belgian frigate Leopold Ist, in the morning of Friday, november 7, within EUNAVFORMED mission. Newspapers already write of the capture of 4 presumed smugglers, omitting the fate of all of the other new arrived, supposedly shunted in the surrounding centres. Another 713 more  migrants land from the Coast Guard’s ship “Diciotti” at the port of Pozzallo, in the same Friday afternoon.

Photo Lucia Borghi

Hotspots for Migrants, „an uncontrollable meat grinder that is soon going to be clogged.”

Lawyer Fulvio Vassallo Paleologo is analyzing the first hotspot to open on Lampedusa on the day that EU commissioner Avramopoulos is visiting the center. “The hotspots are a system of incarceration and deprivation of individual liberties; they lack a legal basis and foster illegality.”

The Incipit group: Let’s call them ‘Centres for Identification’, not ‘Hot Spots’

At the ‘Accademia della Crusca’ (the most important Italian institution for the protection of Italian language) in Florence, the group Incipit has been formed and is now active, with the purpose of monitoring new neologisms and words of foreign languages, when they first appear in the spoken Italian, before they become usual terms for things.