ROME — Italy’s right-wing government pressed ahead with plans to crack down on migrants as they arrived by the hundreds on Monday at a Sicilian port after a Coast Guard rescue. Dozens more were taken on board a charity boat from an unseaworthy vessel operated by smugglers, while others came ashore unaided.
This week, the Senate is due to take up proposed legislation put forward by the government of far-right Premier Giorgia Meloni that aims to make it harder for migrants to gain temporary permission to stay in Italy.
Coalition ally Matteo Salvini, who leads the anti-migrant League party, wants the country to eliminate a status known as “special protection” for many of the tens of thousands of migrants who have come ashore in Italy for years now aboard smugglers’ boats launched from Libya, Tunisia, Turkey and other places.
That status allows migrants who are unlikely to win refugee status to stay in Italy for two years, pending renewal. During this time, they can work legally and rent housing.
Salvini claims the possibility of “special protection” acts as a “pull factor,″ in encouraging migrants to leave their homelands in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
While Meloni has said she’d like to see that status eliminated, lawmakers from another coalition party, Silvio Berlusconi’s conservative Forza Italia, have indicated they could push for the time to be slashed from two years to six months.
“It’s not so much a question of numbers, but of (sending) a signal of severity that we want to give,″ Maurizio Gasparri, a prominent Forza Italia senator was quoted as saying in Corriere della Sera on Monday.
The number of migrants arriving this spring has risen relentlessly.
A Coast Guard boat with about 200 migrants aboard pulled into the harbor of Catania, Sicily early Monday. They were among some 600 migrants rescued by the Coast Guard during the weekend in Malta’s search-and-rescue sector of the Mediterranean. For years, humanitarian groups have lamented that Maltese authorities often ignore distress calls from foundering migrant vessels.
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