Italy plans to crackdown on migrants, to eliminate “special protection” law

Rome: Italy’s government has pressed ahead with plans to crackdown on migrants as they arrived by the hundreds at a Sicilian port after a Coast Guard rescue.

A Coast Guard boat with about 200 migrants aboard pulled into the harbor of Catania, Sicily early Monday.

They were among some 600 migrants rescued by the Coast Guard during the weekend in Malta’s search-and-rescue sector of the Mediterranean.

Also on Sunday, an Italian naval vessel brought some 300 rescued migrants to another Sicilian port, Augusta, Italian media said.

This week, the Senate is due to take up proposed legislation put forward by the government of far-right Premier Giorgia Meloni that aims to make it harder for migrants to gain temporary permission to stay in Italy.

Meloni’s government last week declared a six-month national state of emergency to help cope with the influx of migrants, mainly by shortening the time need to fund or erect new housing or repatriation centers for those losing asylum bids.

Coalition ally Matteo Salvini, who leads the anti-migrant League party, wants the country to eliminate a status known as “special protection” for many of the tens of thousands of migrants who have come ashore in Italy for years now aboard smugglers’ boats launched from Libya, Tunisia, and other places.

That status allows migrants who are unlikely to win refugee status to stay in Italy for two years, pending renewal.

Salvini claims the possibility of “special protection” acts as a “pull factor,” in encouraging migrants to leave their homelands in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Many of the migrants are fleeing poverty or a lack of decent jobs in sub-Saharan Africa, northern Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Egypt.

By Monday, roughly 33,000 migrants had arrived in the year to date, compared to about 8,500 in the same period in each of the last two years.

While Meloni has said she’d like to see that status eliminated, lawmakers from another coalition party, Silvio Berlusconi’s conservative Forza Italia, have indicated they could push for the time to be slashed from two years to six months.

“It’s not so much a question of numbers, but of (sending) a signal of severity that we want to give,” Maurizio Gasparri, a prominent Forza Italia senator was quoted as saying in Corriere della Sera on Monday.

For years, humanitarian groups have lamented that Maltese authorities often ignore distress calls from foundering migrant vessels.