Immigration: Silvio Berlusconi

Leaky Boats Dept: That’s because Mineo has been pushed onto the front lines of Italy’s – and Europe’s – immigration crisis, one that has sent relations between France and Italy to a new low, created ugly new tensions between the Italian south and the anti-immigrant north and highlighted Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s dubious standing on the world political stage, according to Globe And Mail. Mineo, with a capacity of 2,000, is getting more crowded by the day as the Italian government empties the tiny island of Lampedusa, located midway between Sicily and Tunisia, of migrants. In the past two months alone, about 23,000 Tunisians, most of them young men, have landed at Lampedusa in small, leaky boats, turning the island into an overcrowded sanitary risk and enraging the 5,000 Italians who live there and inside, it’s a different story. Built by the U.S. military in the late 1990s to house soldiers’ families, the camp is now ringed by a barbed-wire fence and is off limits to visitors except for the Italian Red Cross, police officers and government officials. Mineo is packed with about 1,600 migrants – legal status yet to be determined – from North Africa, Ivory Coast, Pakistan, Afghanistan and other countries where life is dangerous because of wars and environmental disasters, or hopeless because of racism and lack of job opportunities. “They are asylum seekers,” said Gabriella Salvioni, the Red Cross director at Mineo. “They will be given case-by-case interviews to determine their futures.” As reported in the news.
@t barbed wire fence, prime minister silvio berlusconi