Members of the leftist Italian Democratic Party and their allies are attempting to block or hinder the migration outsourcing deal recently signed by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her Albanian counterpart, with some leftists comparing Albanian migrant camps to Guantanamo Bay.
The Democratic Party has demanded the agreement be put to a vote in the Italian parliament but has claimed not to have heard a response from Prime Minister Meloni or her government, while others have promised to filibuster the policy as soon as they are able, Il Giornale reports.
Left-wing parties have reportedly been especially active in the Constitutional Affairs Committee of the Chamber of Deputies, where they have allegedly put forward a number of amendments to change or stifle the Albania agreement.
Riccardo Magi, the leader of the liberal pro-Europe party More Europe, slammed the move to place migrant centres in Albania, stating the policy was akin to “Guantanamo Made in Italy.”
Paolo Emilio Russo, a member of Forza Italia, one of the parties in Prime Minister Meloni’s ruling coalition, stated that Deputy Prime Minister Antonio Tanjani would speak to parliament on the issue and defended the agreement.
“This is an additional intervention compared to the ‘normal’ policies of management of an epochal and delicate phenomenon such as immigration. As we have always said, we need to increase regular arrivals to curb irregular immigration, he said.
He went on to tell Italian media:
The opposition’s request to suspend the discussion of the urgent provisions on immigration and international protection already scheduled for today in the Constitutional Affairs Committee therefore makes no sense. With this decree, which will be further improved by the examination, we will also make the reception system more efficient and transparent, as requested by many municipalities, we will give more economic and concrete tools to the Police and Fire Brigade.
Prime Minister Meloni announced the agreement with Albania last week alongside Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama in Rome, with the pair signing a memorandum of understanding to create a new facility in northern Albania that will be able to process around 36,000 migrants per year or 3,000 at a time.
“The agreement provides for setting up migrant centres in Albania that can hold up to three thousand people,” Meloni said adding, “When we started discussing it, we started from the idea that mass illegal immigration is a phenomenon that no European state can tackle alone.”
The agreement does have stipulations regarding which migrants qualify to be sent to Albania as only those rescued or picked up by Italian authorities qualify. Those who make it to Italian territory on their own do not.
The agreement also does not cover migrants who may have been picked up by migrant taxi NGOs and dropped off on Italian territory.
NGOs and migration activist groups have criticised the agreement, with Amnesty International calling it “illegal and unworkable” and the NGO Emergency saying it is “yet another attack on asylum rights.”
The agreement with Albania comes as Italy has seen the largest number of illegal immigrant landings since 2016, with the United Nations Refugee Agency UNHCR reporting that over 143,000 migrants have arrived as of November 12th, compared to just 105,131 in the entire year of 2022.
Italy is not the only country seeking to outsource its asylum processes as Germany, Austria Sweden and others have also voiced interest in using non-European Union countries to offload the pressure on their own domestic asylum reception systems.
Germany, in particular, has seen a huge influx of asylum claims this year, recording over 188,000 applications as of August, a nearly 80% increase compared to the same period in 2022.
In an effort to stem the tide of new arrivals, Germany extended border controls on its borders with several countries including Austria and Switzerland after making a request to the European Union in October to limit the open-borders Schengen Agreement.