Italian minister resigns as migrants moved out of Lampedusa

Italy on Thursday started moving thousands of north African migrants off the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa but a minister and a mayor have resigned because they are being taken to the mainland region of Puglia.

Reuters/Tony Gentile

More than 1,000 migrants were shipped to Puglia after Prime Minister Silvio Berluscnoi’s visit to Lampedusa Wednesday when he promised to “liberate” it.

The tiny island, with a population of just 4,500, has found itself having to cope with as many as 6,000 young migrants, arriving from countries whose Arab spring has opened up their borders and ports.

Residents have protested over the last few weeks and aid organisations have criticised conditions.

Some observers say that Umberto Bossi’s anti-immigrant Northern League, a close ally of Berlusconi, may have had a say in letting the situation to boost anti-immigrant sentiment.

“The League has always banked on this sort of feeling,” Sergio Romano, a senior columnist at the Italian daily Corriere della Sera told RFI. “Northern Italy is highly schizophrenic when it comes to that sort of thing because, on one side, they are very much afraid for their security of the massive arrival of foreigners and, on the other hand, the factories of the north are indeed the main employers of the immigrants.”

But on Thursday deputy interior minister Alfredo Mantovano and local mayor Paolo
Tommasino, both members of Berlusconi's centre-right People of Freedom party,
resigned in protest at the migrants being taken to Puglia.

Mantovano promised on Monday that the tent camp that they are being taken to would not hold more than 1,500 people. Local residents of the small town of Manduria have protested in recent days over the number of people who have escaped from it.

Italy has called on its European Union partners to help it deal with the influx of immigrants. The EU has already made 43 million euros available in the form of emergency aid and repatriation funds. But the EU Commission says that it has no means of forcing other European countries to take migrants.

The transfer of immigrants to Sicily or Puglia, however, is just a temporary solution to the problem. Italy is finding it extremely difficult sorting through the motives for the migrants’ move to see whether they are economic migrants or asylum seekers.

Economic migrants are likely to be sent home, while asylum seekers can go through a long process to have their cases heard.