Italy can’t handle the migrant crisis alone

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s visit to Lampedusa at the weekend – at the invitation of Italy’s right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni – is a clear sign that the Euro establishment has abandoned its Pontius Pilate policy on the illegal migrant emergency in the central Mediterranean. 

In the past week, around 12,000 migrants have arrived in several hundred small boats on the tiny Italian island that lies between North Africa and Sicily. They join the 129,869 migrants who have already reached Italy by sea this year – double the number last year over the same period. This year’s total is likely to exceed the 2016 record of 181,436. 

Von der Leyen dropped everything to come to Lampedusa. ‘We will decide who comes to Europe, not the people traffickers!’ she said.  

It was a ‘highly symbolic’ moment, Meloni argued at a press conference in Rome on Monday. It shows the Euro establishment at last accepts what she told me when I interviewed her last year and what she has been urging it to do ever since. That