The first bill for deportations from Italy to Albania is costly for Meloni: 18,000 euros per migrant. international

The first Italian ship to send migrants rescued at sea to a new detention and repatriation center opened this week in Albania, a country that is not a member of the European Union, has cost Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government dearly. military ship pound Carried by only 16 ships with a crew of about 70 people, about 1,000 migrants a day arrived on the island of Lampedusa from where it set off. The Italian press has calculated that the trip involved expenses of 18,000 euros per person, with the context for the entire trip involving expenses of between 250,000 and 290,000 euros, as estimated. RepublicTo. These are figures that NGOs and Italian immigration experts consulted by this newspaper also consider correct. The Italian Ministry of the Interior, consulted by EL PAÍS regarding the amount, refers to the Ministry of Defense, which has not yet responded. The opposition talks of “the most expensive propaganda in the history of Italy”.

And that calculation only includes the cost of transfer. Then there is the housing in the center of Gazadar, which was built in 2023 following an agreement between Italy and Albania and which is expected to cost 800 million over five years, a figure that may increase in any case. Here their asylum requests are analyzed with an accelerated process and, if rejected, they are deported. The European Commission, which has blessed the plan, has said it is necessary to explore ways to outsource migration management. The Italian experiment will be decisive.

In principle, pound It will reach the port this Wednesday. There, experts estimate that maintenance costs could be at least four times higher per person than in Italy (35 euros per day), if it is full, but much higher, up to 10 or 15 times, if it is Is not complete. There are 880 places at the centre, although only half are now ready, with another 144 places in the repatriation zone and 20 places in a smaller prison. However, this is only the first iteration, perhaps hastened by the rush to launch the centre, which has been delayed by six months. So far, the theory is that the ship will be full en route to Albania.

However, the complexity of the system the Italian executive had to create to stay within the law has caused costs to skyrocket. And yet, its own effectiveness remains to be seen. For example, a ship that is going to Albania from Monday will take about five days to go and return in good weather. It is solely intended for this purpose, so when it comes and goes, the transfer system in Albania is not activated and the rescued people should, in theory, be disembarked in Italy, as is done so far. .

It is anticipated that this ship will be able to make a maximum of one trip a week and four times a month to the Albanian coast, although the peaks of arrivals are concentrated in the months of good weather and in reality they will be less. That is, ships will spend most of the year traveling to and from, or waiting at sea to fill up spaces, and only a small fraction of migrants reaching Italy will enter the deportation system. Furthermore, this percentage will be further reduced by restrictions that limit the selection of migrants who can effectively be deported to Albania.

military ship pound This is a temporary solution, pending a solution to the task by assigning a type of floating office-hotel ship with capacity for 200 migrants. They have to operate on the high seas without touching land, to select the rescued people who reach them and decide whether they can go to Albania. There are a number of restrictions in place when implementing the new rapid procedure for handling asylum requests, which aims to be resolved in 28 days.

The filter can be summarized as follows: only non-vulnerable adult males from countries considered safe, who, possibly, They would not see their asylum requests accepted and would not be rescued by Italian ships. That is, those aided by foreign NGOs and those who reach the coast with their own boats, those left behind are estimated to represent 40% of the total arrivals.

A European regime that could change everything

But there is another obstacle, the outcome of which is uncertain. The recent ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on 4 October has significantly shortened the list of countries considered safe, whose citizens can be transferred to rapid asylum management protocols. This reduced it from 22 countries to 7, and the excluded countries include all the main countries of origin of immigration to Italy, such as Bangladesh, Egypt, Tunisia or Libya. For example, of the 16 migrants currently being deported to Albania, 10 are from Bangladesh and six from Egypt. And in any case, Syria was already off the list, the third country in the number of arrivals to Italy, with 9,900 so far this year.

A judge in Rome must validate, in 48 hours, the retention of these people in order to enter into this protocol, in a telematic and video process from Albania, which is over the air. The courts of Palermo or Catania, where most of these petitions are dealt with, have already rejected 90% of them. If judges do not validate the applications, these migrants must be deported back to Italy, as the Tirana government has already said they cannot leave reception centers for the rest of the country.

But this is not the only reason to think that it is likely that many of these migrants will eventually reach Italy after taking a long detour. According to experts, the current percentage of repatriations by Rome authorities is 20%. If that percentage remained in Albania, it would mean that the majority would later be deported to Italy. On the other hand, repatriating these people typically takes three to six months, and the center may be saturated, with new transfers to Italy to free up space. In short, the risk is that ultimately nothing will change.