Politicians can’t win on illegal migration

It is eight years now since The Spectator sent me to Lampedusa to see the boats coming in. That was at the start of the 2015 migrant crisis. The island, which is home to just 6,000 locals, had just buckled under the weight of another 1,300 arrivals. I followed them to Sicily and then on up and across the continent. If I may be self-referential for a moment, it was on Lampedusa that I realised the scale of the problem and got the opening lines of my resulting book, The Strange Death of Europe: ‘Europe is committing suicide. Or at least its leaders have decided to commit suicide. Whether the European people choose to go along with this is, naturally, another matter.’

My prediction then was that the people of Europe would try to make their voices heard by electing more and more anti-illegal-migration politicians. And they did so. With few exceptions, Europe responded by electing politicians who were more restrictionist when it came to illegal migration. Italy ended up electing Giorgia Meloni, the most right-wing politician the country had seen in some while.

Yet last week, Lampedusa’s local population was, in just 48 hours, dwarfed by the arrival of roughly 7,000 illegal migrants. Meloni visited, along with a smiling Ursula von der Leyen. Meloni has complained that Italy is being put under ‘unsustainable pressure’ and that the EU is not doing enough. Eight years on from 2015, and less than nothing has changed.

Perhaps it is time to add a further chapter to my already dire prognosis. Europeans will vote for politicians who want to stop the migration. Those politicians may even come into office but the situation will not change. How can this be?

At this stage the online know-alls will claim that Meloni has been ‘bought’ and become ‘a shill’.