Europe migration: Why are so many migrants arriving in Lampedusa at once?
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00:00 Now to discuss all of this, I'm joined in our studio by our International Affairs Editor
00:04 Philip Turrell.
00:05 Philip, first of all, can you tell us more about why there are so many migrants arriving
00:11 in Lampedusa all at once?
00:13 Okay, well I think there are several reasons for this.
00:15 The main reason is that this is the summer and during the summer it's easier to get across
00:21 the Mediterranean, conditions are more favourable and the sea is calmer.
00:25 There have been groups of migrants waiting for several days for the seas to calm down
00:31 and the authorities in Lampedusa have said basically it's a bit like an armada of ships
00:35 arriving in one go and they really can't cope with it.
00:38 Just to give you a figure for example, you said 7,000 migrants have arrived over a period
00:42 of 24 hours.
00:43 The only ability that the authorities in Lampedusa have is to take in 400 migrants.
00:49 So all the others are roaming about trying to find shelter, trying to find food and water.
00:54 Some have been taken in by a local fairground for example, but there is tremendous pressure
00:59 on the authorities, on charities, on humanitarian organisations and they're saying, well look,
01:05 we need desperately to have some help in dealing with these migrants.
01:09 Now the other problem as far as all of this is concerned is that many of these migrants
01:15 don't want to stay in Lampedusa.
01:16 They want to obviously go further north to other countries in Europe and that is another
01:21 problem that Italy has also got to deal with because not many European countries want to
01:27 take those migrants in and that has seriously damaged relations with several of them between
01:34 Italy and its neighbours.
01:36 And it's also bad news for Giorgia Maloney, the Prime Minister of Italy who was elected
01:42 on a ticket of stopping the migrants from coming into the country and it looks as though
01:46 that has not worked as far as she's concerned, although she said she's not surprised by this
01:50 latest high number of arrivals in Lampedusa.
01:55 So what the government's been trying to do is to clamp down on the traffickers, to stop
02:01 organisations from letting boats go out several times in a row to try to bring migrants into
02:07 the country, but that so far hasn't really had any effect.
02:11 We mentioned some of those northern European countries and those migrants wanting to move
02:16 on from Italy, but Germany has just announced that it is to stop taking in those migrants
02:23 from Italy.
02:24 Why this decision now from the Germans?
02:26 Well, this all boils down to the Dublin Agreement, which means basically when a migrant gets
02:31 into the European Union country, it has to apply for asylum in the country in which it
02:34 arrives.
02:35 Now, many of them then go off to other countries and normally they should be sent back to the
02:39 country where they came in there to apply for asylum.
02:43 And Germany is saying, well, look, Italy is not taking back the migrants that it should.
02:48 We've got 12,000 requests for asylum that should be processed in Italy, but all the
02:53 Italians have done so far is to take in only 10 of those migrants that should be having
02:59 their asylum requests processed by the Italian authorities.
03:02 So they say, well, while that has not been sorted out, we're not taking any more migrants
03:06 in.
03:07 And on top of that, we now have a route broken out with Tunisia and the European Union over
03:12 money being given to the Tunisians because a group of Foreign Affairs Committee members
03:17 from the EU were due to travel to Tunisia to talk about the situation there.
03:21 They've been barred from travelling because Tunisia is angry about criticism from the
03:25 EU over this, saying that the money shouldn't go to a country that has such an authoritarian
03:30 government.
03:31 So there's not much progress there either.
03:33 So the whole situation is quite confusing at the moment.
03:36 Thank you so much, Philip Turrell, for this analysis on the situation in Lampedusa.