Despite promises to reduce illegal migration and attempts at negotiating deals with countries outside of the European Union to curb migration flows, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s first full year as the head of the Italian government has been marked by failure.
The Italian interior ministry announced that in 2023 a total of 155,754 illegal migrants had arrived in Italy, up from 103,846 in 2022, an increase of nearly 50%, according to a report from the European Union-funded website InfoMigrants.
For Meloni, the numbers are representative of the biggest failure of her government so far. She had campaigned hard on reducing illegal immigration prior to the 2022 election that saw her party, the national-conservative Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), shock the world and place first, ensuring her premiership in a right-wing coalition government.
Meloni made a number of promises and proposals during her campaign, some of which were reflected in her party’s election manifesto.
Among the proposals was the idea of setting up a naval blockade in the Mediterranean Sea to control the flow of ships entering Italian territory; the vast majority of illegal migrants crossed the sea to reach Italy.
While the proposal was controversial, it did find some support from Italian Rear Admiral Nicola De Felice who told Italian media:
Targeted action to tackle the root causes of illegal immigration is absolutely necessary. The solution may be the implementation of the so-called ‘naval blockade’, understood not as a war-style blockade but a naval interdiction intervention, aimed at blocking the departures of boats linked to human trafficking. Had it been implemented from the beginning, the ‘naval blockade’ would have prevented the deaths of thousands and thousands of people, including many children.
No blockade has ever materialised, although the concept was brought up again by Meloni in September after over 5,000 illegal migrants arrived on the southern Italian island of Lampedusa in a single day, nearly doubling the island’s population of just 6,000.
Lampedusa has been the main focal point of the ongoing migration crisis in Italy. In October, The European Conservative visited the island, finding that arrivals continued almost like clockwork, while the process had become almost regularised as migrants arrived on the island, were processed and departed for the Italian mainland typically within 48 hours.
Meloni has also worked with foreign governments in an attempt to make deals to stop the flows of migrants but those deals have yet to bear any fruit.
A deal with Tunisia was discussed alongside European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and outgoing Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, with a memorandum of understanding signed in August, that aimed to increase EU aid and investment to Tunisia in exchange for a curbing of illegal migrants and acceptance of deportations of Tunisian nationals.
The European Union, however, has been divided on the deal, with some members of the European Parliament concerned the Tunisians may take the cash and not deliver on promises to halt illegal departures, while others slammed Tunisia as an authoritarian regime that should not be given the additional funds.
Meloni admitted her government’s failure last month, claiming immigration was “the most complex phenomenon I’ve ever had to deal with.”
“I know well that on migration the results are not the ones expected,” she said and added, “But I’m not interested in short-cuts that pretend to solve the problem for a while.”
According to statistics from the United Nations Refugee Agency UNHCR, in 2018 just 23,370 migrants arrived in Italy and in 2019 the number was just 11,471. By contrast, the month of August alone this year saw 25,673 arrivals.
