Following the near-complete elimination of the irregular migration flow from North Africa to Malta and Italy, the latter, once again, finds itself threatened to become engulfed in a rising tide of migrants. That tide, luckily for us, has not been directed toward Malta, nor is it likely to be.
This new tide of migrants is quite different from that witnessed in previous years, and, in Malta’s case, two controversial migration policies have proven their, albeit limited, worth: the automatic one-year detention policy for undocumented migrants landing in Malta; and Italy’s push-back pact with Libya.
Between the beginning of the year and 13 February, 5,526 migrants have landed in southern Italy, the majority of whom found their way to nearby Lampedusa and are Tunisian.
The Italian Cabinet has declared a “state of humanitarian emergency” on the small island, and Italian home affairs minister Roberto Maroni has said he fears terrorists were among those arriving in Lampedusa, after having escaped Tunisian prisons and fleeing the country during a month of nationwide anti-government protests that forced dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from the country on 14 January.
In previous years, both Malta and Italy had been inundated with migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, migrants fleeing famine and disease, war, murder and torture, and ethnic and religious persecution.
Above all else, these are people who have an international legal right to seek and apply for asylum in countries such as Malta and Italy. It is very doubtful whether those fleeing Tunisia at the moment could even hope to be accorded humanitarian protection status under international guidelines, and they will, as with the small groups of North Africans that would occasionally arrive with sub-Saharan Africans during the height of the migratory crisis, be sent back to their country of origin.
This brings us to the first Maltese policy – that of a year’s automatic detention for arriving in Malta without the appropriate documents, which has served the country well in this particular case. No Tunisian escapee from prison or elsewhere would seriously entertain thoughts of heading for Malta only to be locked up for a year and to be sent back again. A sub-Saharan African, on the other hand, might deem the detention period a fair price to pay for protection.
The second policy in question is the Italy-Libya agreement to push departing migrant boats back to Libyan shores, although it does not apply directly in this case. This latest wave of migrants presents an example in which such push-backs could be justified, in that the assumption is that those North Africans currently seeking European shores have no valid claim to asylum or humanitarian protection.
Italian foreign minister Franco Frattini, who says Tunisia is no longer living up to its migration control accords, met with Tunisian authorities on Monday night in Tunis to point out that Tunisia was responsible for patrolling its coast, but insisted that European border agency Frontex should beef up its presence in international waters.
Tunisia, however, strongly rejected an offer by Italy for Italian police contingents to help patrol the coast.
As matters currently stand, the authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt have fallen, while further turmoil is very much on the cards in Iran, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya and Algeria. The wrong approach from either of these latter two countries could very well spark further migratory influxes into the EU, which is something to be extremely cautious about.