CASTELNUOVO DI PORTO, Italy, Jan 25, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – “I found a family
here, I worked with the parish priest, I helped with mass, I went to school,”
said Nigerian Anthony Ehikwe, one of hundreds of migrants being expelled from
Italy’s second-largest migrant centre. “And now I do not even have the time
to say goodbye.”
Italian authorities are this week removing migrants from the reception
centre at Castelnuovo di Porto, just north of Rome, after far-right Interior
Minister Matteo Salvini’s tough anti-migrant decree became law.
“You can change immigration policies but you can’t just throw people out
into the street like that,” said an angry Riccardo Travaglini, mayor of this
town of 9,000 people.
“Here, we’ve done a lot to welcome people and, within a few hours, they
decide to dismantle our community,” he said.
The new law, which came into effect in December, ends two-year
“humanitarian protection” residency permits — a lower level of asylum status
based on Italian rather than international law — that were awarded to 25
percent of asylum seekers last year.
The Italian Refugee Council has said it was “seriously concerned” by the
new legislation which “will put thousands of people outside the law and only
a very few can be repatriated.”
“I do not think it’s about security because sadly in a few months we will
see the effects of this chaos they are creating on purpose,” said the
centre’s legal advisor Rosanna Just.
“The only result is that they destroyed something that worked very well.”
The law also reorganises asylum-seeker management by closing large
reception centres like Castelnuovo, which Salvini says are expensive and
breeding grounds for criminals.
Migrants and asylum-seekers were given 48 hours notice of the centre’s
closure, and on Tuesday the authorities began the evacuation of 500 people,
including 120 women and 14 children.
Some have been taken to reception centres elsewhere in the country, while
others have preferred to head for Rome on foot before they are taken away.
– Pope’s visit –
“After having accompanied them, sometimes for years, on a path of
integration, we had to tell them that they have to go, without even knowing
their destination,” said Just.
“The children were attending school, some (of the migrants) even had work
and from one day to the next it’s all taken away,” she said.
Dozens of the town’s Italian’s residents on Tuesday protested against the
closure of the centre, which opened in a very different political climate 10
years ago.
Pope Francis visited in 2016, celebrating mass and famously washing the
feet of 11 migrants of different religions.
“It will be difficult to rebuild all this somewhere else,” said Ehikwe, 27.
“I’ve been living here for two years, I don’t know where I’ll be sent, I
don’t know what will happen,” said Ehikwe, a Roman Catholic who fled
religious persecution in Nigeria, making the treacherous crossing of the
Mediterranean from Libya to Italy.
“This is a common sense operation that will save Italians six million euros
($6.8 million) a year without taking anyone’s rights away,” Salvini said on
Wednesday.