Local officials on the southern Italian island of Lampedusa have called for government intervention after the island’s refugee center was deemed incapable of dealing with the record influx of migrants. More than two thousand arrivals were registered over the weekend, Il Giornale reported on Sunday, August 27th.
Ever since the early 2000s—even before the onset of the European migrant crisis in 2015— Lampedusa has been the primary landing site of refugees crossing the Mediterranean to Europe. Despite its reception center being designed with a maximum capacity of 800 in mind, it is not uncommon for it to house three times that number of refugees there, even after filling the six other refugee camps in nearby Sicily and Puglia.
But the camp simply cannot maintain such high numbers for too long before the overcrowding makes it impossible to properly distribute food and provide basic assistance. The island, which is home to only around 5,000 native inhabitants, registered 130 landings and over 4,000 migrants just in the last 48 hours. Without a swift intervention from Rome, the authorities fear the camp’s collapse could be imminent.
“New paths need to be pursued. The interior minister needs to tell us what he intends to do and especially with what resources,” said Lampedusa mayor Filippo Mannarino. “Our patience is running out.”
Mannarino recently met with Adolfo Urso, the Minister for Economic Development, to discuss how the crisis affects tourism and investment on the island, but he believes his mission to relieve the pressure on the town will not succeed unless he grabs the attention of the highest level of the Italian leadership.
“I ask Prime Minister Meloni to come and spend two days in Lampedusa with me,” the mayor said during his joint press conference with the minister on Sunday. “We will sit in my office after visiting the island, and together we will find a solution. I am sure we will.”
Urso, however, stressed that Rome’s resources were also limited—as the Italian government recently announced that over 100,000 migrants arrived in 2023 so far—and appealed to Brussels instead. “It must be understood that Italy cannot be left alone,” the minister said. “In the face of this extraordinary phenomenon, Europe must intervene.”
Right now, only the assistance of the Red Cross and the tireless, non-stop work of law enforcement officials registering and then transporting asylum seekers to further camps prevent the total breakdown of the Lampedusa center. Increasing the size of the camp is frequently brought up as a short-term solution, but locals say it’s out of the question.
“Enlarging the Lampedusa hotspot is next to impossible; it is a very small island. The understandable resistance from the locals would be very strong,” the prefect of Agrigento, Filippo Romano, said in a recent interview. “We are, instead, building a hotspot in Porto Empedocle that will be run by the Red Cross itself and will be a kind of bridge to the mainland—it will be a useful relief valve to avoid such situations.”
