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Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first female Prime Minister, has this week achieved what the Tories failed so fatally to do with their doomed Rwanda scheme. Thanks to her determination and charm, Italy has become the first European nation to successfully offshore illegal migrants to a non-EU country.
However bogus the claims of migrants, once they’re in the EU it’s virtually impossible to deport them
Under Meloni’s scheme, migrants picked up by Italian naval and coastguard vessels from small boats in the Sicilian Channel will be ferried directly to Albania, 750 miles away. They will not set foot in Italy. It is potentially a game-changer, particularly as voter fury across Europe forces politicians to do something to stop illegal migrants.
The plan is now operative, and on Wednesday the Italian ship Libra docked in the Albanian port of Shengjin to disembark the first migrants destined for what Meloni’s critics compare to Nazi concentration camps. The aim is to fast-track up to 3,000 asylum applicants a month in two purpose-built structures and send most back to their countries of origin.
Her detractors say the cost – €670 million across five years – is an astronomical waste of money. Yet that is peanuts compared to the monthly cost of each migrant to the Italian taxpayer of €945 a month. Last year, a near record 158,000 migrants arrived by sea in Italy, which cost €150 million a month.
There were only 16 migrants on board Libra: ten from Bangladesh and six from Egypt, neither of which is a war zone. But their arrival in Albania may well prove to be highly significant – for one simple reason.
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