Eleven months after the Italian woman prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, sealed with a warm handshake with her Albanian counterpart, Edi Rama, the controversial agreement to create in Albania two closed centers for the identification and detention of migrants rescued from junk boats sailing to Italy, everything is ready.
“We’re not getting rid of them, we’re helping them, sending a message to traffickers,” Piadendozzi responds to criticism from the Italian opposition and NGOs about the new model for managing irregular migration flows.
It is the first time that, within the Old Continent, in a non-EU country. thousands of people being rescued as they attempt to reach the coast of Italy will be transported. Many European capitals, although they do not say so openly, will be watching in the coming months if the Italian-Albanian experiment is crowned with success and the flows in the Adriatic are reduced in order to copy it, political analysts comment.
The detention centers in Guidar and Shenzhen, with a capacity of 3,000 beds, will be operated under Italian management with around 500 staff. The aim is to examine asylum requests submitted by guests within 28 days.
Those who receive a positive answer will be transferred to Italy. If the request is rejected, the irregular migrants will be repatriated. Rome estimates that around 36,000 asylum requests will be processed in Albania annually.
The Italian government emphasizes that the majority of arrivals in recent months in Italy are immigrants from Tunisia, Egypt and Bangladesh and not refugees.
The construction of the two centers cost around 70 million euros and for their operation for 5 years, according to the agreement, the Italian taxpayers will be burdened with an additional 600 million euros.
The opposition in Italy shouts that the bill would be smaller if “instead of exporting migrants in containers that still do not have light, water, telephone, funds were invested in their better reception in Italy”.
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