Every day, boatloads of refugees arrive on Italian shores. European Union law requires Italy to fingerprint them so that if they apply for asylum in another country they can be sent back to their port of entry. Instead, Italy is letting thousands of migrants slip quietly into northern Europe, with no record of their time in Italy.
An Associated Press analysis of EU and Italian data suggests that as many as a quarter of the migrants who should have been fingerprinted in the first half of the year were not. While EU law required Italy to share fingerprints for about 56,700 of the migrants, only 43,382 sets were sent.
Even accounting for possible delays in sending fingerprints to Brussels, it’s clear that thousands of refugees are slipping through the cracks.
“It’s a very serious problem,” European Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem told the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter this week. After complaints from member states, the European Commission is studying whether Italy is living up to its EU obligations. The Italian government didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.
EU countries are angry that they can’t send migrants back to their first port of entry when there is no record of where that was. Human rights officials also worry that the refugees can’t benefit from U.N. protections for refugees if they don’t officially exist.
Italy, by not fingerprinting migrants, avoids the possibility that they’ll be sent back. It is already spending 9.5 million euros ($13 million) a month to rescue thousands of migrants making the perilous crossing from North Africa aboard smugglers’ boats in an operation launched after 360 migrants drowned off Sicily last year, and feels it’s doing more than its share already.
The refugees themselves are happy not to be fingerprinted. With unemployment at 12.6 percent and youth unemployment at 43 percent, new arrivals have little interest in staying in Italy, and would rather settle in northern Europe where there are better job opportunities and more established refugee communities.
Aided by Rome’s blind eye, Syrian migrants in particular are falling off Italy’s radar, making their way to Milan’s central train station in groups of 100 or more. They are met by railway police, aid workers and city officials who offer food, a bed and — for those who ask — advice on asylum.
Of the 10,500 who arrived in Milan since October, only eight requested asylum in Italy, city officials said. Many others, after a few hours or days in Milan, headed north with no record of ever having set foot in Italy.
“No Syrian wants to get fingerprinted,” said Shadi Howara, a doctor from Damascus passing through Milan.
The Italian Interior Ministry reported 60,435 migrants arrived by boat in Italy this year through June 30. A number of those are accompanied children who by EU rules shouldn’t be fingerprinted; Save the Children estimates there were 3,700. During the same time period, the EU said Italy shared 43,382 sets of fingerprints.
As more Syrians began to arrive and officials spotted children sprawled out on stone benches, the city of Milan set up a welcome desk in the train station in October, according to the city’s top immigration official, Pierfrancesco Majorino.
The welcome desk, a table on the mezzanine of the cavernous station, sits behind yellow plastic barriers marked “Syrian Emergency.”
The scene is surreal: As a nearby escalator ferries fashionable commuters to and from work in Italy’s financial capital, Syrian war refugees mill about in donated clothes and little more than a plastic bag’s worth of belongings, waiting for the next train north.
Why haven’t they been fingerprinted?
“You have to ask the Interior Ministry,” Majorino said, adding that only law enforcement agencies — not city workers — are authorized to carry out the task.
The Interior Ministry declined repeated requests for comment on Italy’s application of the EU fingerprinting directive.
Syrian refugee Issam Zarai, 35, spent 30 hours in a packed boat with his wife and two children, 6 and 7, before being rescued at sea. On his way to Sweden, he had no problem with Italy’s lax application of the EU directive.
“They took no fingerprints,” he said, “and no names.”
So they check all travelers airports for explosives or drugs, but thousands simply wonder in from the most terrorist fertile countries in the world with NO checks!!!!! Unbelievable! This must not continue.
Despite this madness and monumental security breach, the ‘legal’ immigration within EU countries is bad enough. Many people from the poor eurozone countries including Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy are emigrating to the richer countries in the EU. More often than not, they are totally ill prepared for the move, with no languages or qualifications for the new host country.
Fleeing unemployment, hundreds of Spanish are migrating to idealised Norway in search of work. Few have had much luck. Many have found only unemployment, cold and despair. Another chapter in the great crisis afflicting Spain.
An example is Paco who recently left Spain for Norway:
“For a long time there’d been nothing to fall back on. My parents, who are already elderly, had been paying my mortgage of 540 euros for a few months. Nothing was working out, and my prospects were pretty dim. One night I was in a bar and the TV was on in the background. The programme was Españoles en el mundo, or “Spaniards Around the World”. A man came on who lived in northern Norway, and he said he was earning 4,000 euros. He seemed pretty happy. I said to myself, ‘Paco, you’ve got to get yourself up there.’”
Francisco Zamora, 44, of Alcantarilla (Murcia), is a quiet guy. He’s wearing a scarf wrapped three times around his neck to keep out the bitter cold. An electronics graduate, with experience in construction and factories, he was once earning 3,000 euros a month. But all that was left behind three years ago. Like him, hundreds of Spanish who have been without work for months left a Spain in crisis with their sights set on one of the richest countries in the world; the choice simply had to be a good one.
But once there, the myths crumbled around them. Lacking both qualification and languages, doors closed in their faces. The authorities don’t want to know anything about them. Some have spent all their savings and are barely surviving, and some are sleeping on the street.
Last August, Paco asked his parents for more money and bought a one-way ticket to Bergen. It was the first time he was out of Spain. In his pocket he had 225 euros. The first week he spent wandering around one of the most picturesque cities in the world.
“I carried a small rucksack that fit into the lockers at the train station. I paid five kroner (0.75 euros) to use the bathroom and I washed myself there. One day I met another Spaniard who told me about a shelter where I could go during the day for food and to get warm.
Polar cold, the language, and exorbitant prices
The Robin Hood Foundation occupies two floors of a wooden house in the center of Bergen. The hostel opened in 2003 “with the idea of giving shelter to the poorer Norwegian families who can’t afford four euros for a coffee in a bar,” explains Wenche Berg Husebo, the woman who presides over this private foundation (which is funded with 270,000 euros of public money).
It’s Wednesday morning, and in Robin Hood the main language you hear is Spanish. Between 60 and 100 people pass through the house every day. Half of them, says Mark Amano, its director, are Spaniards. “Before it was Norwegians, Poles, a family of political refugees… But in March, the Spaniards started arriving,” explains Husebo. “Since then 250 have come. At first they were men of all ages, and then single women in their thirties. Then parents, some with their children. Most don’t get a job because they don’t speak Norwegian or English.”
Norway, with its oil, its enviable welfare state, its policies for reconciling work and family life, and above all, high wages and extremely low unemployment (at three percent) has seen a new breed of emigrant arrive in recent months, pushed out of Spain by prolonged unemployment and by progressive wage cuts. Norwegian newspapers have dubbed them “refugee workers of the euro”.
Norwegian prosperity and that television programme Españoles en el mundo (many name that programme when asked why they chose Norway; the last three recent episodes devoted to the country had between 3.5 million and 2.8 million viewers) have been a siren to a growing number of Spanish (the number registering at the Spanish Embassy has grown from 358 in 2010 to 513 in 2011, although many are not registered).
Once in the country, though, they run up against an impassable barrier consisting of three elements: the polar cold, the language, and exorbitant prices. To rent a room costs 600 euros; a litre-carton of milk, two euros.
“I have never seen such a distressing situation in Norway”
Although Norway has refused to join the European Union, it did sign the Schengen Agreement, which gives free entry to EU citizens. However, the country lacks the public infrastructure to support those who have arrived with nothing in their pockets. “The government doesn’t offer them housing, money or aid. That is left to Caritas, the Red Cross or the Salvation Army,” explains Bernt Gulbrandsen of Caritas Oslo.
The local media have been quick to collect stories of these new immigrants. In a country with only five million inhabitants, the news has had an impact. In Bergen (260,000 inhabitants), a prosperous city where there are few vagabonds, newspapers and radio stations have devoted several articles to the arrivals. “They fled the crisis in Spain, but life in Bergen isn’t like they had imagined,” says one headline. Or: “Many of the euro refugees live in poverty in Bergen”.
“I have never seen such a distressing situation in Norway,” says Astrid Dalehaug Norheim, one of the journalists who have covered this subject for the newspaper Vårt Land. “It reminds me of a visit I made to Moscow during the crisis of the late nineties, when Russians from rural areas began to migrate to cities looking for work, but ended up wrecked in shelters.”
The testimony of Tuna, one of the employees of the Red Cross in Bergen, shows how some Norwegians see the situation: “Before it was mainly Poles who came here, but then the Spanish started to arrive. They have no food or work and ask for help. We do offer support to political refugees, but not to those who come voluntarily.”
So before we can even assist our legal european neighbours, we must stop the tide of the thousands of illegal immigrants who are undocumented and simply walk in with no fingerprinting or any security checks whatsoever. Europe will pay the price soon enough.
