Here, writing in the First Post is Robert Fox on what the plight of migrant workers on the Libyan border might presage:
Curiously, in almost none of the international television coverage of the refugees at the border crossings has anyone been asked where they are going, and whether they really have anywhere safe and secure they could call ‘home’. Last Thursday alone, 500 refugees arrived in four small boats on the southern Italian island of Lampedusa. In the past six weeks nearly 7,000 have arrived from Tunisia, more than doubling the resident population.
Italy’s interior minister Roberto Maroni, from the anti-immigration Northern League, has claimed that the number of illegal migrants into Italy from North Africa could top one million this year alone. He has cited the EU border agency, which has put the estimate at 1.5 million. “I ask Europe for all the necessary measures to deal with a catastrophic humanitarian emergency. We cannot be left alone.”
In 2008, Silvio Berlusconi signed a friendship agreement with Muammar Gaddafi, handing over $5 billion as reparations for Italy’s colonial rule in Libya in the early part of the last century. One of the results of this deal was that Gaddafi rounded up asylum seekers from across Africa trying to reach Italy via Libya, and put many of them in camps. According to some Italian officials, Libya has intercepted and detained more than 2.5 million asylum seekers in the past five years. If Libya becomes another failed or semi-failed state on the southern shore of the Mediterranean, rather as Albania has on the northern shore, it will soon be the transit point for another big wave of migration into Europe.
Read the whole thing.
And while you are at it, note this post by Rod Liddle over at the Spectator:
Some interesting statistics [are] buried away in the excellent Populus survey carried out for the Searchlight Educational Trust (and which received a lot of press attention last week). The headline figure was that 60 per cent of British people (including first, second and third generation immigrants) think that immigration has been a “bad thing” for the country….The other headline figure was that a large minority of [British] Asian people wish to see an end to immigration.
In fact, the figures are even more remarkable. Nearly 80 per cent of British people, including a majority of Asians, believe we should have much more rigorous controls on immigration than we do now. Only 5 per cent of people think there should be no controls on immigration. Then there’s this; asked the question “The arrival of immigrants has changed my local community for the better”, the total number strongly agreeing was……………………3 per cent. The total number agreeing at all with this proposition was…………..12 per cent.
As Mr. Liddle points out this report came out “in a week when it was revealed that net migration to the UK has risen by about thirty per cent per annum, with 572,000 people arriving in the last twelve months.”