Immigration: not enough interest

By Richard North - September 15, 2023

For all the high-octane coverage of Derna in the Guardian, even its readers don’t really care.

All day yesterday, I was watching the running “most viewed” list, showing the top ten most popular stories in the online version of paper. Despite constant refreshment of the Derna story, it never once appeared on the list.

Generally speaking, the point I made at the end of May still stands. Africa is the invisible continent and there is very little interest in what goes on there.

Another story from Africa, which one might have thought was of interest, is one that made it to the BBC website, but not much further than a terse Reuters report.

That was the “total collapse” of the electricity grid in Nigeria, although one has to concede that, since it happened four times last year, some might think it not particularly newsworthy.

However, in a country of 213 million, with an installed capacity of a mere 12.5GW (compared with the UK’s 76.7GW for a population less than a third of the size), I thought it interesting that the country normally struggles to produce a quarter of its rated capacity, and at the moment cannot even do that.

Another invisible story is the situation in Sudan. Despite a warning from the country’s departing UN special envoy that the conflict “could be morphing into a full-scale civil war”, and in the face of evidence of mass graves in Darfur, signalling another round of genocide, the amount of coverage in the UK press is minuscule.

And yet, we are certainly interested in the consequences of this turmoil – when they actually begin to impinge on our consciousness. This we can see is the story briefly aired in the Telegraph yesterday on the deteriorating situation on the Italian-owned island of Lampedusa, where 7,000 asylum seekers have arrived on its shores in the last 48 hours, outnumbering the population of 6,000.

While there are reports of babies, children, pregnant women and unaccompanied minors among the new arrivals, most of the migrants are young men, with large numbers from sub-Saharan Africa. The continent about which we care so little is making its presence felt.

In this respect, there is some linkage with Derna. As the Guardian points out, because of its proximity to Italy and Greece, the city is a hub for thousands of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean.

A significant number of the casualties in Derna may have been undocumented migrants waiting to make the hazardous sea crossing. Many may have been sheltering in poor housing close to the port, where the some of the greatest destruction has occurred.

Furthermore, there is also a proven linkage between the regional military dictator, Khalifa Haftar – who controls Derna – and people smugglers. This emerged after the shipwreck in June of the vessel Adriana.

Sailing from port of Tobruk – also under Haftar’s control – the vessel sank off Pylos in Greece with the loss of 600 lives. After a media investigation led by Spiegel, the main facilitator of the ill-fated voyage was identified as a man named Muhammed A, a member of a special forces unit within the Libyan Navy controlled by Haftar.

Cynically, militias answering to Haftar have also been double-dipping. For instance, according to the investigative group Lighthouse, it is known by EU authorities that Haftar’s Eastern Libyan militias are not only smuggling migrants but also carrying out pullbacks.

The IOM and the UNHCR are describing these as a “lucrative source of income for the eastern Libyan rulers involved”, with Italy and Malta making deals with Haftar to reduce migration.

In May, Haftar met with Italian prime minister Meloni to discuss migration and in June Italy’s interior minister said they would ask Haftar to collaborate in stopping departures. The same month, a Maltese delegation met Haftar in Benghazi to discuss security challenges in the region, with particular emphasis on irregular migration.

Italian efforts to encourage Haftar to stop departures are described as “bribery”, yet they point to “a very clear admission of how Italy intends to work and what it promised to Haftar: if you reduce the human smuggling volumes, we will inject capital”.

Dysfunctional and corrupt African governments, therefore, are not only a danger to their own peoples. They also have a direct impact on Europe (and the UK – if that is regarded separately) and are corrupting European policy responses.

In the front line, of course, is Italy, which has seen 124,000 migrants land on its shores this year, mostly from Tunisia. This compares with 65,000 in the same period last year. The political ramifications are far-reaching as Lampedusa Mayor Filippo Mannino describes the surge as, “the defeat of Europe, of a system that … never implements real and true migration policies”.

Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni is particularly on the spot, especially after having pledged to halt illegal immigration, even if it took a European Union-led “naval blockade” to do it. The short-term fix is to share out the arrivals with other EU countries, but Italian expectations are beginning to impact heavily on other member states.

France, in particular, is reacting to flows from Italy, as its interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, announced plans to strengthen the border between Menton and Italy’s Ventimiglia. “We have a 100 percent increase in flows, which affects the Alpes-Maritimes and the entire Alps”, he declared by way of justification, during a visit to the border area.

Germany, which has registered more than 200,000 requests for asylum in 2023, is also taking action to stem the flows from Italy. It has announced it is suspending its participation in the European Voluntary Solidarity Mechanism (EVSM), in retaliation for what it claims is Italy’s refusal to accept returns on the Dublin III Regulation.

A German spokesman said that more than 12,400 people were eligible to be returned to Italy but only ten of them had been accepted. “Once the Italian government starts respecting the Dublin rules, the solidarity mechanism will be restored”, the spokesperson said.

Politically, the German coalition government is between a rock and a hard place, facing its electoral support being eroded by the anti-migration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party which, for the first time, has polled more than 30 percent in the key state of Brandenburg.

Ahead of elections next year – in a state which encircles Berlin and has been controlled by the centre-left SPD for more than 30 years – AfD support now stands at 32 percent.

Apparently indifferent to the chaos gripping the EU’s migration policies, though, Starmer has stepped into the fray with a plan to seek an EU-wide returns agreement for asylum seekers who come to Britain. In an approach verging on “cakeism”, he then says that the quid pro quo of any deal, such as accepting quotas of migrants from the EU, would be for future negotiations with Brussels.

Predictably, his plan has been dismissed as “delusional” by European diplomats. EU sources say there is “absolutely no question of helping the UK” until the bloc had resolved its own internal efforts to reform its “broken” asylum-sharing system – which doesn’t look to be any time soon.

One EU diplomat says: “The EU’s asylum system is broken; internal negotiations have now dragged on for more than seven years without an end in sight. There is absolutely no question of helping the UK until we have put our own house in order”. European governments, he added, are under much more pressure on asylum and migration than Britain and are not going to come to Starmer’s rescue.

For all the turmoil, though, the manifest lack of interest in African affairs points to a lack of appreciation of the other half of the migration equation. While European nations are increasingly seeking to reduce “pull” factors, nothing like enough attention is being given to “push” factors, those factors which drive migrants to leave their own countries.

Some of these we can do little about, but there is always room for intelligent intervention. That, however, would first require us to take more interest in what is going on. And that seems rather unlikely.