Camp Of The Saints

The European Parliament’s leftist majority continued to downplay the security risks brought by the mass influx of illegal migration during Wednesday’s key plenary debate on the Migration Pact in Strasbourg (October 4th), with some going as far as laughing when conservatives presented Europe’s worsening crime statistics.

Reaching an agreement on the EU’s flagship Asylum and Migration Pact is without doubt currently the highest priority on Brussels’ agenda as all institutions are racing to get it done in the next few months or risk losing grip of it altogether amid next year’s European elections.

On October 3, 2013, one of the worst migrant boat shipwrecks took place off the coast of the southern Italian island of Lampedusa as people smugglers led an estimated 360 people or more to their deaths. This week, groups from across Europe came to the island to commemorate the tragedy.

Organised by the October 3 Committee, an Italian NGO formed after the 2013 massacre, a four-day event entitled “A Europe of Rights” was held on Lampedusa from September 30th to October 3rd, the anniversary of the shipwreck.

The European Union is planning a major reform of its asylum laws. The measures, a response to a sudden inflow of asylum-seekers, include making it possible to extend the period during which refugees can be detained at the external borders and applying strict immigration criteria to include more individuals.

In Germany, the environmentalist Greens are the most migration-friendly party in government and oppose tough restrictions. But Chancellor Olaf Scholz, of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) has put his foot down and decided that Germany would not veto the EU plans.

Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni has sent a letter to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stating that she was “astonished” by Berlin’s recently announced initiative to finance pro-migration NGOs operating in the Mediterranean and in southern Italy, accusing him of deepening the crisis instead of cooperating to solve it, Il Giornale reported on Monday, September 25th.

Meloni’s complaint was sent to Berlin after Germany’s social-democratic government announced last Friday that it would finance two NGOs—including the rescue charity SOS Humanity—with up to €790,000 each to continue and expand their work. 

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 realized 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.”

When hundreds of mostly African migrants escaped from the transfer centre in Porto Empedocle, Sicily, last weekend and began roaming the town’s bakeries and shops begging for food, the mayor took to social media to explain. There were 2,000 migrants squeezed into a facility meant for 250, he told terrified locals. The conditions were inhumane. The repeated attempts to escape were inevitable.

Civilizations are mortal. We know of entire worlds disappearing, of empires collapsing. It is happening again.

Imagine a ship. You start by changing the bow, then the rudder, the hull, the mast, the sail and finally all the constituent parts as they erode. At the end of this transformation, will it still be the same ship? Plutarch’s image in the “Life of Theseus” offers some help for a reflection on identity. Let’s imagine that the boat is our civilization. Would we still be faced with the same civilization?

With the wave of mass migration towards Europe we are faced with the greatest upheaval of European identity since the times of the Spanish Reconquista and the Ottoman wars. Italian PM Giorgia Meloni said that “millions” will come, after 10.000 migrants landed in the Italian island of Lampedusa.

Newly released figures from Frontex, the EU’s border protection agency, revealed on Thursday, September 15th, that over 114,000 illegal migrant crossings across the Mediterranean to Italy were recorded between January and August, twice the number recorded during the same period last year, accounting for half of the illegal border crossing detected in 2023.

The agency, in its latest press release, stated that the number of illegal border crossings along the bloc’s external borders jumped by 18% in the first eight months of 2023, exceeding 232,350 instances, and marking the highest total for the period from January to August since the 2016 migrant crisis.

Germany announced a stop to taking in migrants from Italy on Wednesday, September 13th, The Telegraph reported. Berlin cites challenges to accommodate newcomers, while the Mediterranean country struggles with an unprecedented wave of arrivals, and its entire asylum system is on the brink of collapse.

Berlin also said that the move was necessary because Italy fails to comply with the Dublin regulation, which states that migrants should be returned to the first EU member state they entered until their asylum claims have been assessed.

You can’t escape the terribly inconvenient truth: if these illegal migrants had weapons, their hostile trespass onto the sovereign lands of others would be unambiguously seen as an act of war.