Italy “begs for help,” threatens to close ports over African migrant invasion

JULY 1, 2017 7:50 AM BY CHRISTINE DOUGLASS-WILLIAMS68 COMMENTS

Jihad Watch ran a story a few days ago reporting that Italy’s migrant welcome centers were in astate of “collapse” as huge waves of African migrants flooded in from Libya. The crisis of this invasion has steadily worsened, and now Italy is crumbling under the hijrah and openly declaring that it has lost control:

Italy says that it is unable to cope with this year’s expected flood of refugees, and is demanding help from the European Union, or else it will close all its ports to ships carrying migrants

That country should indeed close all its ports and take lessons from Hungary’s leader Victor Orban and Poland’s Prime Minister Beata Szydlo, who have rejected EU migrant quotas in order to protect their citizens from Muslim migrant crime and jihad attacks, and the attendant economic suicide.

Regrettably, however, a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, Mattia Toaldo, called preventing boats from docking “a panic measure” and said it was possibly illegal. Yet in the midst of the Italian emergency migrant crisis, perhaps the EU is just beginning to wake up from its slumber. The president of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani, said:

A cry of alarm has come from Italy, an SOS…we can’t leave it on its own. After the closure of the Balkan route, it is indispensable to also close the central Mediterranean one. We can’t have any more delays in solving the problem.

“Italy Begs for Help After 12,000 Migrants Arrive in Four Days”, by John Xenakis, Breitbart, June 30, 2017:

….Italy has threatened to close all of its ports to ships of foreign NGOs carrying migrants and refugees, after being overwhelmed by the arrival of 12,000 migrants in four days on 22 ships. The UN Migration Agency said 8,863 migrants were rescued trying to reach Italy from Libya, and the EU’s border agency Frontex said its boats had recovered an additional 2,700 people.

About 76,000 migrants have arrived since January, and some estimates say that 220,000 people could land in Italy by the end of 2017.

The ships cross the Mediterranean Sea from Libya and mostly contain African refugees. In one Italian port in Reggio Calabria alone, 1,066 people disembarked from the Save the Children rescue ship Vos Hestia on Thursday. Among them were 241 unaccompanied minors.

According to a European Council official:

In recent years people smugglers have launched massive numbers at the same time. But this year we are witnessing levels never registered before in such short periods of time.

Loss of life and continuing migratory flows of primarily economic migrants on the central Mediterranean route is a structural challenge and remains an issue of urgent and serious concern.

The EU and its member states must restore control to avoid a worsening humanitarian crisis.

Italy agrees that the EU must restore control. Italy says that it is unable to cope with this year’s expected flood of refugees, and is demanding help from the European Union, or else it will close all its ports to ships carrying migrants. Since the rescue operations do not take place in Italian waters, Italy is under no obligation under international law to take the refugees in, according to some experts. Analysts say that this would be a humanitarian catastrophe because the ships would have to be diverted to other countries, for which they have inadequate provisions.

One of the NGOs operating rescue boats said that it understood the pressure that Italy was under, but:

However, we also believe that closing the ports of safety to people seeking refuge from war, violence and poverty cannot be the solution. We would like to stress again that NGOs are not the cause, nor the solution to this humanitarian crisis. Without our presence at sea, even more people would die….