Italy sends migrants to Albania

3 weeks ago 7

Italy has opened a detention center for migrants in Albania to discourage others from crossing the Mediterranean Sea.

LAUREN FRAYER, HOST:

Italy has an unusual new immigration policy. It's deporting asylum-seekers to neighboring Albania. That country has agreed to process them. The first batch of migrants arrived there this month. But as Willem Marx reports, it hasn't gone exactly as planned.

WILLEM MARX, BYLINE: In the warm mid-October sunshine, several figures filmed from afar entered a large holding center in the Albanian port of Shengjin. The men came from Bangladesh and Egypt and had been picked up several days earlier in the central Mediterranean. A handful of Albanian protesters held banners that called this offshoring of Italy's immigration policy the end of the European dream. For more than a decade, the European Union struggled to confront soaring migration from less-developed nations, with Italy seeing tens of thousands arrive each year across the treacherous waters south of Sicily.

(CROSSTALK)

MARX: A promise to tackle this challenge helped elect Italy's right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. The dozen migrants that arrived in Albania last week were returned to Italy within days after a court order found their countries of origin, Egypt and Bangladesh, could not be considered safe. Since then, Meloni's government sought to override that ruling with an updated law, and so more migrants could soon be housed here in an old air base at the edge of a remote Albanian village we visited called Gjader.

And as we weave our way through several backcountry roads, amid some tumbledown vineyards and a few farm buildings, we come across a pretty striking sight - a very tall, metal fence with several Italian police officers standing at the gatehouses.

(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS IN GRAVEL)

MARX: Once out of the car, I start talking to one of them.

(Speaking Italian).

So one of the guards outside these huge metal fences at the Gjader camp has just been explaining to me - they don't know how long they're going to be here. He's come from Lampedusa, an island just south of Sicily, where a lot of migrant arrivals from North Africa typically reach. And of course, many of them will be diverted, if the Italian government gets its way, to this camp.

For some locals, the camp's creation represents an economic blessing but also a moral quandary.

ALEKSANDER PREKA: (Non-English language spoken).

MARX: "The village saw development," says village head Aleksander Preka, "but people became pessimistic and stressed when they saw the camp fenced with an 8-meter-high barrier."

Preka is also a restaurant owner in Gjader and says his community consider the new jobs and new customers tied to the camp a privilege, though many were concerned that migrants would be forcibly detained.

PREKA: (Non-English language spoken).

MARX: "Let them come, get registered, have their data collected, and then let them be free, too," he says.

PREKA: (Non-English language spoken).

MARX: "Some will work, some will leave, because this is what a united Europe is about."

PREKA: (Non-English language spoken).

MARX: "People with hands and eyes seek bread, seek work, seek well being, so it's not good to fence them in like that."

(CROSSTALK)

MARX: For community rights activist Arilda Lleshi, who I met back at a cafe in the capital, Tirana, even those financial benefits are debatable.

ARILDA LLESHI: Some people are seeing it as a temporary boost in the economy there because they've opened some jobs, and the real estate prices have gone up. I see that as very problematic for the economy as well. I don't want us to become this project-based economy where European countries bring their refugee camps.

MARX: Italy's partnership with Albania may start to operate very soon. But whether it actually works in the long run remains an open question, and many other European countries will watch very closely for an answer.

For NPR News, I'm Willem Marx in Gjader, Albania.

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