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You know, I’ve no wish to join the big group of intellectuals who spend their time debating immigration… I have the impression that these talks serve no purpose. The people already know it all, intuitively: that France, as our ancestors fashioned it centuries ago, is disappearing. And that we keep the gallery amused by talking ceaselessly of immigration without ever saying the final truth. A truth that is moreover unsayable, as my friend Jean Cau noted, because whoever says it is immediately hounded, condemned then rejected. Richard Millet came close to it, look what happened to him! [See here for more on this].
Is the seriousness of the problem being kept from the French people?
Yes. Starting with the politicians in charge first of all! Publicly “everything’s going well, Madame Marquessa”. But behind closed doors, they acknowledge that “yes, you’re right: there is a real problem”. I have several edifying letters on this subject from prominent leftist politicians, from those on the right too, to whom I sent the Camp of the Saints. “But you understand: we can’t say it …” These people have a double language, a double conscience. I don’t know how they do it! I think the distress comes from there: the people know that things are being hidden from them. Today, tens of millions of people don’t buy into the official discourse on immigration. Not one of them believes that it is an opportunity for France “une chance pour la France”. Because reality imposes itself on them, every day. All of these ideas boil in their heads and don’t come out.
You don’t believe it’s possible to assimilate the foreigners welcomed into France?
No. The model of integration isn’t working. Even if a few more illegals are escorted to the border and we succeed in integrating foreigners a bit more than today, their numbers will not stop growing and that will change nothing in the fundamental problem: the progressive invasion of France and Europe by a numberless third-world. I’m not a prophet, but you see clearly the fragility of these countries, where an unbearable poverty is established and grows ceaselessly alongside indecent wealth. Those people don’t turn to their governments to protest. They expect nothing of them. Continue reading this article
Europe’s weakness in refusing to defend itself from a Camp-of-the-Saints-style invasion of diverse “refugees” continues to simmer. Around 350 African boaters arrived Tuesday on Italian territory, and the EU requires that the European country where fleebags land has to take them. Italy’s southern islands, particularly tiny Lampedusa, have been overwhelmed by the flood of Africans, some escaping the Arab Spring and others seeking a ready-made first-world lifestyle.
Unfortunately, European elites are too afflicted with liberal notions of virtue to see a civilization-threatening invasion when it is upon them. Perhaps Europe can absorb a million third-worlders per year, even with a bad economy, but it cannot survive 10 or 20 million annually, and there’s no reason why that number wouldn’t come if the dissatisfied of Africa see Europe putting out the welcome mat for everyone. Plus, Africa is on track to double in population over the next 40 years, so the pressure to flee is bound to increase.
Below, Africans heading for Italian territory in 2011.
Egypt, for example, is a very crowded 82 million persons, and the New York Times reported this week that disappointment in the nation’s political direction has convinced increasing numbers to leave. Naturally the attitude is one of immigration entitlement, that the millions who want to move somewhere better can do so, and the citizens of the target nation have no say in the matter.
In 2011 the Lampedusa people demanded and got assurances from the Italian government that the boatloads of Africans would stop and most would be repatriated to Tunisia, but now the problem is as bad as ever.
RT had a decent video piece about of the situation:
The IslamVersusEurope blog recently posted this item of “asylum seekers” on Sicily demanding that their claims be processed more quickly, which looks more like a riot than a plea for better service.
Here’s more from RT.com about Italy’s efforts to make Brussels get involved in sorting out the chaos by spreading the problem around.
Italy demands an urgent shakeup of Europe’s asylum policies, as it bears the brunt of a large-scale inflow of illegal migrants from the Middle East and Africa. A leaked draft EU summit statement, however, promises no radical steps until June next year.
Aseter, a young Ethiopian in Sicily, says she is lucky. She was on a refugee boat heading from Africa to Italy the same day another boat like hers capsized in the Mediterranean, killing more than 300 asylum-seekers.
She is now prepared to put her luck to test once again, by illegally crossing EU borders together with her two companions. She is not new to taking risks, as she had to first go by foot from Ethiopia to Sudan, then travel to Libya to finally take the most nerve-racking boat ride of her life.
“In Sicily we managed to avoid getting registered. It’s illegal but we need to go further north – there’s nothing here for us,” Aseter tells RT correspondent Egor Piskunov, while she hides her face from the camera.
Under EU regulation all newcomers must seek asylum in the country where they arrive. And under Italian law anyone avoiding registration is sent home.
That does not prevent newcomers from taking their chances of trying to stay unregistered until reaching an EU country with what seems to them better opportunities. Shiferaw Genene, President of Italian Association of the Ethiopian Community believes it’s only natural.
“When you arrive here [in Italy] they give you the very minimum,” Genene told RT. “There’s no jobs, no school and you sleep in the street for six months.
Italy is one of the worst European states in this regard.” Italy and Greece are the most affected by the influx of refugees fleeing conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa. And that puts huge pressure on their economies, already burdened by recession. Continue reading this article
In Germany, there’s a group of refugee demanders with a website called Lampedusa in Hamburg. The front page photo shows a banner reading, “We did not survive the NATO war in Libya to die on the streets of Hamburg,” which is kind of a double-down statement of Screw the West for ousting the dictator and now give us free stuff in Germany.
Or something.
They put on a noisy protest the other day. It seemed more about intimidation than friendly appeal.
The RT.com YouTube posting contained additional text:
Hundreds of refugees and activists of the “Lampedusa in Hamburg” group took the streets of Hamburg on Wednesday to protests against the alleged unlawful treatment of migrants by the Hamburg Senate.
Protesters marched from the main station to the city hall and back in a 2-hour demonstration to also show their support to the victims of the recent shipwrecks occurred off the Italian island of Lampedusa.
Clashes erupted Tuesday night in Hamburg after around 500 protesters demonstrating in front of the squatted theatre “Roten Flora” reportedly threw stones and bottles to police, who used pepper spray and batons on protesters.
Below, the Pope welcomed African workers to job-starved Europe in overwhelmed Lampedusa.
The Pope is behaving like a typical liberal, being generous with things that don’t belong to him. Europe is short millions of jobs for its own people, but Francis thinks Europeans are too selfish in wanting to maintain their culture and economy.
Why doesn’t Pope Francis prove his sincerity by welcoming a few hundred Africans to the country he rules? Vatican City is a nation of its own, with territory of 110 acres, an American ambassador and a flag. The most effective leadership comes from setting a good example, and the new Pope is missing a big opportunity to flaunt his virtue. Most of the Africans are likely Muslims, but that’s a big plus among crazy-leftist Europeans.
Al Jazeera’s report on the Pope’s do-gooder trip was surprisingly decent:
Britain’s leftist Guardian newspaper seemed kindly disposed toward the Pope, perhaps because of his extreme statement favoring the right of the worldwide poor to violate European sovereignty. This pro-illegal immigration view is an article of Catholic doctrine, as expressed by priest Michael Seifert during a 2005 Texas protest: “Any family in economic need has a right to immigrate, that’s our posture, if a family is hungry and the family needs work, then society should provide a way for people to do that.” The attention to Europe’s homegrown poor and their right to a job was lost because of the emotive photo op provided by the papal junket.
Pope uses visit to island of Lampedusa to highlight plight of migrants and asylum seekers who die trying to reach Europe
In perhaps the sternest homily of his papacy so far, Pope Francis has inveighed against “the globalisation of indifference”.
Speaking on Monday on the small island of Lampedusa, the point of entry into Europe for tens of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers, Francis said: “We have become used to the suffering of others. It doesn’t affect us. It doesn’t interest us. It’s not our business.”
Wearing vestments of penitential purple, the pope said he had chosen to visit Lampedusa on his first journey out of the Vatican after learning of a recent incident in which migrants had died at sea while attempting to cross from north Africa. The thought of their suffering had come back to him repeatedly like “a thorn in the heart”, he said.
As his plane landed, more than 160 Eritreans were coming ashore in the port – the latest of almost 8,000 arrivals on Italy’s southern coasts so far this year, according to UN figures. Another 40 are known to have died. Continue reading this article
There’s a new Pope in the Vatican, and he is still making a first impression. So far, we have seen TLC, hugs and a simpler lifestyle. He recently announced his first foreign foray, and he chose Lampedusa as the place to display his special papal compassion regarding the deaths of several Africans on their way to the island, then on to Europe presumably. The choice may not have been the wisest, given recent history.
Below, Africans created a tent city of trash on Lampedusa in 2011.
Lampedusa is a small island which is the southernmost point of Italy, located only 70 miles from Tunisia. As a result, many thousands of young Muslim men have tried to reach it as a gateway to the welfare offices of Europe. Apparently numerous able young fellows have not been interested in fighting for the glorious Arab Spring. (Photos of the Africans in Lampedusa show 20-something men almost entirely.)
Tens of thousands of demanding “refugees” have deposited themselves on the island over the last two years and have rioted when told they would be repatriated. The mayor of the town picked up a baseball bat to defend himself from the refugees rioting in the streets.
Will Italians see the Pope’s compassion as stirring up more trouble for them? Perhaps Francis should consider Adam Smith’s observation: “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.”
Pope Francis has chosen the southern Italian island of Lampedusa for his first trip outside Rome, to show solidarity with tens of thousands of refugees who each year brave a perilous journey there in flimsy boats, the Vatican said on Monday.
The small island, Italy’s southernmost point, is the conduit for mostly African immigrants fleeing conflict or economic hardship in order to enter the European Union.
The Vatican said Francis was “profoundly touched” by the flood of immigration, and will throw a wreath of flowers into the sea in memory of the many who have drowned in waters off the island during the visit on July 8.
The pontiff will also meet groups of immigrants who have made the crossing and will celebrate a mass in a sports center on the island.
A holding center on the island built to hold 380 has long been overwhelmed, and the island’s predicament has become a symbol in Europe and Italy for those who see immigration as out of control.
Lampedusa’s regular population of about 6,000 has often been outnumbered by migrants sleeping in improvised tent encampments dotted around the island, which in normal times lives from fishing and tourism.
Over 50,000 people arrived there in a surge caused by unrest in North Africa in 2011, and recent good weather has caused another increase in the hundreds arriving each week as it allows a less risky crossing.
Today CBS reporter Mark Knoller noted: “Pres Obama authorizes admission of 70,000 refugees to the U.S. in fiscal year that begins Oct 1. Down from 76K last year and 80K in 2011.” (@MarkKnoller)
But they keep coming, because there is no OFF switch in Washington.
All of these new residents need education and eventually jobs in a terrible economy that is getting worse, not better. Refugees are dumped in communities regardless of whether the town’s resources can support them. For one example, see my January blog: Oakland Is Burdened with Unemployable Refugees Having Expensive Health Problems.
It doesn’t help when the United States takes economic fleebags who have made it as far as Malta or Lampedusa because it sends the message that a welfare-filled future in the first world awaits lucky foragers. They could stay home and work to improve their own societies, but when liberal western governments hand out an array of free stuff, it can be irresistible. On a planet of seven billion residents, an all-welcoming first world is an irresponsible message to impart because the numbers don’t work.
A total of 27 Somali and Eritrean migrants, including three families, yesterday left Malta for the US under the US Refugee Resettlement Programme (USRRP). This brings the total of refugees relocated in the United States since 2007 to 985.
US Ambassador Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley and Home Affairs Minister Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici bid them farewell on the start of this new journey in their life. [. . .]
Below, Africans head for outlying islands of Europe, like Malta and Lampedusa.
Even the diversity enthusiast New York Times noticed the problem on Malta. The island’s response of setting up even rudimentary refugee centers demonstrates that “If you build it, they will come.”
VALLETTA, Malta — On a recent evening, the immigrants living in the steel shipping containers out by the abandoned airport here began to bed down for the night, pulling their mattresses outside to escape the suffocating heat.
Some had lived at this government-run “open center” for several years. Others had arrived more recently. Most shared a sense of defeat.
“Really, it’s very bad,” said a Somali man who gave his name as Z. Mohamed. He had fled war in Somalia, was imprisoned in Libya as he made his way north and now finds himself in this grim complex, with its communal water taps and bathrooms. “You can see with your eyes how it is and every week I go to the employment center for a job, but there is nothing. They never call.”
Perhaps nowhere are the consequences of the European Union’s one-size-fits-all immigration rules more apparent than here in Malta, a tiny archipelago in the Mediterranean between Libya and Italy, which now has the highest ratio of immigrants per capita of any European Union member. Many of its immigrants are caught in a limbo, unable to find jobs or afford housing — and unable to move off the island.
It’s not that Mr. Mohamed and the other new arrivals wanted to come to Malta. Most had never heard of the place until their flimsy boats foundered on the way to Italy, and the Maltese coast guard rescued them from the sea. For that they are grateful.
But now what, they ask. This densely populated nation, 400,000 people in an area a tenth the size of Rhode Island, has little to offer them. But under European rules, because they first landed here, they are pretty much stuck here. Continue reading this article
In north Africa, people are still escaping the failed Arab Spring. The Italian island of Lampedusa is located just 70 miles from Tunisia, making it a handy first stop for boat people desirous of relocating to the welfare heaven of Europe.
The mayor armed himself with a baseball bat, reflecting the anger and alarm of the locals by that point. The Lampedusa residents demanded that the Italian government solve the problem by heading off boats at sea, which it appeared to do at least for a while.
In 2011, more than 50,000 crossed the Mediterranean to reach the Italian island. This year the number is around 1500, a big change from the earlier chaos. However, Italian authorities fear that a worsening situation in Tunisia or Libya will unleash the thousands once again.
More than 400 African migrants have arrived on the Italian island of Lampedusa over the past three days.
Over the weekend Italian coast guards rescued around 350 migrants – mostly from Tunisia and sub-Saharan Africa – near Lampedusa from two boats. A further 81 arrived on Monday.
Maltese authorities also rescued 80 migrants on an overcrowded dinghy.
Lampedusa and Malta are the nearest gateways to Europe for thousands of African migrants.
Lampedusa lies about 80 miles (120km) from Tunisia, while Malta is about 220 miles (355km) from the Libyan capital Tripoli.
Many of the migrants arrive on overburdened and poorly equipped wooden boats.
Overwhelmed
On Tuesday Italian media reported that two policemen were taken to hospital after being injured in protests by a group of 14 Tunisian migrants in the town of Ragusa on Sicily.
The men were being held at a detention centre in Ragusa when they climbed the roof and began throwing glass and other objects, according to Italian news website Adnkronos. Continue reading this article
Regarding the subject of world population, we unfortunately live in interesting times. The West, particularly Europe, suffers from insufficient reproduction and has made bad choices about immigration to fill the worker bee gap.
In contrast, the Third World is going gangbusters, as noted in the article below, which is standard boilerplate for world overpopulation reporting now that we approach the seven billion milestone. We read plenty of junk news in the press — entertainment trivia, horserace political updates and the shocker crime of the week — but there is almost nothing about the growing numbers of humans. That issue is transforming the world more than any other.
The Third World is becoming more crowded, violent and dysfunctional, and its residents from North Africa to Sri Lanka and Latin America are fleeing to the First World. So what happens there is very much felt here.
Below, already crowded India is expected to overtake China around 2030 as the planet’s most populous nation when the number of Indians reaches an estimated 1.6 billion.
She’s a 40-year-old mother of eight, with a ninth child due soon. The family homestead in a Burundi village is too small to provide enough food, and three of the children have quit school for lack of money to pay required fees.
“I regret to have made all those children,” says Godelive Ndageramiwe. “If I were to start over, I would only make two or three.”
At Ahmed Kasadha’s prosperous farm in eastern Uganda, it’s a different story.
“My father had 25 children — I have only 14 so far, and expect to produce more in the future,” says Kasadha, who has two wives. He considers a large family a sign of success and a guarantee of support in his old age.
By the time Ndageramiwe’s ninth child arrives, and any further members of the Kasadha clan, the world’s population will have passed a momentous milestone. As of Oct. 31, according to the U.N. Population Fund, there will be 7 billion people sharing Earth’s land and resources.
In Western Europe, Japan and Russia, it will be an ironic milestone amid worries about low birthrates and aging populations. In China and India, the two most populous nations, it’s an occasion to reassess policies that have already slowed once-rapid growth.
But in Burundi, Uganda and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, the demographic news is mostly sobering as the region staggers under the double burden of the world’s highest birthrates and deepest poverty. The regional population of nearly 900 million could reach 2 billion in 40 years at current rates, accounting for about half of the projected global population growth over that span.
“Most of that growth will be in Africa’s cities, and in those cities it will almost all be in slums where living conditions are horrible,” said John Bongaarts of the Population Council, a New York-based research organization.
Is catastrophe inevitable? Not necessarily. But experts say most of Africa — and other high-growth developing nations such as Afghanistan and Pakistan — will be hard-pressed to furnish enough food, water and jobs for their people, especially without major new family-planning initiatives.
“Extreme poverty and large families tend to reinforce each other,” says Lester Brown, the environmental analyst who heads the Earth Policy Institute in Washington. “The challenge is to intervene in that cycle and accelerate the shift to smaller families.”
Without such intervention, Brown says, food and water shortages could fuel political destabilization in developing regions.
“There’s quite a bit of land that could produce food if we had the water to go with it,” he said. “It’s water that’s becoming the real constraint.”
The International Water Management Institute shares these concerns, predicting that by 2025 about 1.8 billion people will live in places suffering from severe water scarcity.
According to demographers, the world’s population didn’t reach 1 billion until 1804, and it took 123 years to hit the 2 billion mark in 1927. Then the pace accelerated — 3 billion in 1959, 4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1987, 6 billion in 1998.
Looking ahead, the U.N. projects that the world population will reach 8 billion by 2025, 10 billion by 2083. But the numbers could be much higher or lower, depending on such factors as access to birth control, infant mortality rates and average life expectancy — which has risen from 48 years in 1950 to 69 years today. Continue reading this article
Lampedusa, the southernmost island outpost of Italy has been overwhelmed for months by thousands of North Africans, who are mostly young males who don’t want to fight for freedom in the celebrated Arab Spring. They are using the chaos to pose as refugees in order to enter Europe and avail themselves of its wealth and generous welfare system.
Over the last year, more than 48,000 illegal alien opportunists have at various times deposited themselves on Lampedusa, which covers less than 8 square miles and has the unlucky position of being only 70 miles from Tunisia.
Below, North Africans created a tent city of trash on the island of Lampedusa.
Tensions have accumulated on the island as the faux refugees have demanded better treatment from their unwilling hosts as well as entrance to the full refrigerator that Europe represents. When a recent batch of 1500 Muslim boaters were told that they would be repatriated, they burned down the immigration center and proceeded to riot. Perhaps they were trying to say that Italy’s immigration system is broken, or is insufficiently celebratory of diversity.
A Pew poll from January 2010 showed that Italians had among the highest “anti-immigrant” sentiments on earth, although Pew didn’t bother to specify illegal immigration. Whatever the specifics of public opinion, the images of hostile demanders of entry can’t be going over well in Italy.
The video below describes attacks by the North Africans against local people, and the mayor said he had armed himself with a baseball bat and was prepared to defend himself and the citizens. Too bad the mayor isn’t better equipped for self-defense.
Eleven people have been injured after refugees clashed with riot police on the Italian island of Lampedusa after hundreds of protesters burned the reception centre down.
The devastating fire started on Tuesday night when the Tunisian migrants, protesting against their immediate repatriation, allegedly set fire to their bed mattresses. The blaze reduced much of the controversial centre to a smoking ruin.
On Wednesday violence broke out between riot police and refugees on the island. Three Italian Carabinieri, a policeman and seven Tunisians have been injured.
The fire dealt a heavy blow to Italy’s ability to deal with a continuing flood of refugees from North Africa in the wake of the popular revolts in Tunisia and Egypt and the civil war in Libya.
More than 48,000 have reached the shores of southern Italy since the start of the year.
Many of the 1,200 migrants held in the centre fled when three fires broke out late on Tuesday.
As police stationed on the island rounded them up, the fires blazed out of control and destroyed three buildings in the complex.
The fires were allegedly lit deliberately by Tunisians protesting against their imminent return home, having been ruled to be economic migrants rather than bona fide asylum seekers.
Bernardino De Rubeis, the outspoken mayor of the island, said he had been warning the government in Rome for days that tensions among the migrants were increasing to breaking point.
“In the past few days I raised the alarm more than once. Enough is now enough,” he said, calling for Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister, to call an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss the crisis.
He said islanders were fed up with having to host so many migrants. “We’re in a war, and the people will react. There are people here who want to go out into the streets armed with clubs.”
The mayor demanded that Italian navy ships be sent to the island “immediately” in order to transfer the migrants to camps in Sicily and the mainland.
He said police and paramilitary Carabinieri officers should have responded to the arson much more forcefully.
“We can’t understand why police and Carabinieri go in hard against fans in football fans – their own compatriots – while on Lampedusa it’s completely different. We need a strong hand on the island too. People are tired of all this, they want to get back to living in peace.” Continue reading this article
Europe may face boatloads of rustic African males with the idea that they are entitled to a cushy modern lifestyle just because they reach the continent, Camp of the Saints style. The man of a dozen spellings, Col. Moammar, may be indisposed at the moment, but he has strategized to dump thousands of unfriendlies on Europe as revenge for its support of the Libyan rebels.
Below, more than 200 Africans sail from Libya to the Italian island of Lampedusa last spring in hopes of reaching Europe eventually.
According to the Al-Jazeera report below, Kadaffy recruited African migrants as fighters, which he now wants to unleash as “floodgates of immigration as a weapon against Europe.”
Wait, aren’t Islamic societies like Libya supposed to be all-welcoming to fellow Muslims? Many of the Africans certainly are members of the ummah, like the Somalis lurking in Tripoli. But even Muslims don’t like Muslim diversity.
Interestingly, the usually sensible London Telegraph characterized the Africans on Sept 3 as Libya’s lost immigrant souls with nowhere to go. Huh? Nowhere to go? What’s wrong the Africans returning to the countries of their birth, where they have relatives and other connections? That would be a nice project for the NGO do-gooders. Allowing the Africans to enter Europe would be wrong in so many ways, like national security for instance.
TRIPOLI: With the Mediterranean stretching to the horizon, the fishing port at Janzour is a jewel on the coastline around the capital.
It is also where Muammar Gaddafi held Europe to ransom by threatening to flood it with illegal immigrants. While he was in power, he demanded billions of dollars in European Union funding for his help stopping human trafficking.
But, ever since the NATO bombing campaign started in March, he seems to have not only abandoned attempts to stop smuggling but also encouraged it as revenge.
For much of the past few months, men in uniform had been directing immigrants on to boats bound for Italy, witnesses said.
Africans who landed this northern summer on Lampedusa, an island south of Sicily, said their passage was free, in contrast with the $US1000 ($938) usually demanded by smugglers.
No boats have left since the rebels drove out Gaddafi’s men, but the human cargo is still stranded there; a thousand African men, women and children, clustered in the dirt under beached boats. They are hungry, scared, penniless and desperate to escape.
This raises the prospect of an influx of migrants to Europe in the months to come, with no guarantee that the rebel government will want or be able to stop it.
Many Africans fear they will be murdered by rebels taking revenge. Since Gaddafi’s soldiers fled two weeks ago, Libyan gunmen have prowled the camp, raping women and robbing the men at knife point.
Gaddafi had invited them into the country, giving them jobs and housing in return for their support. He used their presence to blackmail Europe.
Last year, Gaddafi warned that unless the EU paid him $6 billion a year to stop immigration, Europe would ”turn black”. Before that, Libya and Italy had co-operated with each other to stop immigration.
After NATO backed the rebels in March, Gaddafi again threatened to open the floodgates.
When the NATO bombing of Libya began, 28,000 Africans arrived on Lampedusa from Libya from March to August. There were few the previous year.
We have already heard rumors that Washington may take some number of the absconding freedom fighters to this country: Does Obama Plan to Welcome Dangerous Libyan Refugees to America? That would be a terrible decision for national security reasons as well as economic (as in, no spare jobs), so let’s hope Obama is too busy campaigning for re-election to welcome any extraneous Muslim refugees.
This just in from the British government: no welcome mat will be forthcoming for North Africans calling themselves refugees. Or so the government says now.
BRITAIN will not open its borders to migrants fleeing the turmoil in North Africa, the Home Secretary has insisted.
Theresa May told her EU counterparts that the UK was not prepared to take on any “burden sharing”.
Ms May issued her warning at a meeting of Europe’s Home Affairs ministers in response to calls for help from Italy.
She did however offer “practical assistance” to Italy on its own shores.
A Home Office spokesman said: “We were quite robust in stating that we are not planning to open our borders to those coming to Europe from North Africa. We do not agree with ‘burden sharing’ which is what Italy wants.”
More than 25,000, mainly Tunisians, have arrived in Italy since the unrest there and thousands of Libyans, Egyptians and other Africans are expected to make the crossing as border controls in war-torn Libya fail.
The tiny Sicilian island of Lampedusa is swamped by thousands of migrants arriving by the boatload every day. Continue reading this article
Thousands of “refugees” from North Africa and beyond continue to pour into the tiny island of Lampedusa, overwhelming the population of 5,300. Or perhaps they shouldn’t be called refugees because nearly ALL of those fleeing are young men, instead of families as one would expect of true refugees. In fact, some media call them illegal immigrants straight out, as the Telegraph has done.
The islanders are not happy and indeed feel threatened by the mobs of Muslim men. Below is a video of local fishermen in which they said they didn’t want to leave their wives and children alone to go out and work because they were afraid of what might happen. The piece is dated is March 6, when there weren’t as many North Africans as now. The article posted further below also notes how the local girls are “being pestered by gangs of immigrants for sex.”
Below, the North Africans have built their own tent city on the island, with an abundance of trash.
According to the western press, the Libyan “rebels” are fighting a heroic battle against the dictator Moammar Gaddafi. And optimists have dubbed the regional unrest as the Arab Spring. But not everyone is feeling the hope. The men encamped in Lampedusa prefer to flee rather than fight, which doesn’t say much for the faith they have in their own societies. Many are obviously taking advantage of the upheaval to get into Europe instead of rebuilding their homelands. It must look too much like work.
Below is a video where the Tunisians protest that they haven’t been welcomed properly to Europe — they are outraged that the accommodations are no better than what they left.
The situation is terrible for the Lampedusa people, and it has been created by Europe’s willingness to take these thousands of faux refugees. They should be turned away by the military before they reach the island and eventually get to the West.
Swathed in Red Cross blankets, they were waiting for Silvio Berlusconi’s promises to come true as they huddled at midnight around a fire made from cardboard boxes.
Here in Lampedusa, a rocky island off the southern tip of Italy, the ten North Africans plan a new life in Europe — and believe the libidinous Italian Prime Minister will make it possible.
‘We pray for freedom,’ says Mohamed Fitouri, a 23-year-old builder from Benghazi, the rebel-held, second largest city in Libya, speaking in the firelight. ‘I cannot return to my country if it is ruled by Gaddafi. None of us can. Our future is in England or France. There is no turning back.’
Whoa! It’s pretty doubtful the British or French want any more Muslims residing in their nations. How is this situation not an invasion?
The guy quoted certainly is not much of a Libyan patriot. Mohamed has already given up on the home team’s chances. What European country would want a disloyal opportunist like him?
Last week Berlusconi made a whistlestop tour of Lampedusa, where 6,000 clandestini, or illegal immigrants, have arrived in rickety boats from North Africa — 70 miles away across the Mediterranean — in less than seven weeks. The island actually sits closer to the African coast than it does to Sicily, which makes it an obvious target.
Fleeing their turbulent homelands of Libya and Tunisia, they have doubled the population of this once picturesque holiday island. Today it has become a grotesque place, fouled by a toxic stench of human waste.
The narrow streets are thronged with men wearing a bizarre garb of tennis shoes and hoodies covered in blankets from the Red Cross which, fearing a health epidemic, set up a field hospital in a tent by the port two days ago. So many immigrants have been arriving that Italy has declared it a national emergency.
By night, the unwelcome arrivals sleep in wooden fishing boats pulled on to the quayside for the winter, down narrow alleyways, or top-to-tail like sardines on the floor of the port’s harbour office.
On the hillside above the port, there are hundreds more, in makeshift shelters of plastic sheeting and corroding oil drums that litter the hillside. Down below, the once-clear waters are awash with plastic bags, banana skins and soiled paper, the debris of suffering humanity.
Despite a massive police presence, and attempts to move thousands off the island to holding camps in Italy, the situation is potentially explosive. With teenage girls being pestered by gangs of immigrants for sex, the presence of so many young men has also led to sporadic outbreaks of violence on the few streets here.
Drug use is also widespread. Some of the immigrants — among them escapees from Tunisian jails — have smuggled in narcotics along with large sums of cash to fund their journey farther north into Europe.
But drugs or not, these men are hated by the 2,000 families who live here, and Berlusconi knows it. On Wednesday he promised to free Lampedusa of all the illegal visitors in less than 60 hours with an airlift and a fleet of ships to take them to the mainland, where their claims for asylum will be processed.
After that, a minority will be sent home, though many will be allowed to stay and eventually claim naturalisation. Others will head to France and try to board lorries bound for England. Continue reading this article
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Britain, on the other hand, has been