At the beginning of November, the EU will launch the “Triton” operation. This operation is intended by the Italian government (which holds the rotating presidency of the EU and initiated it) to replace the military operation “Mare Nostrum,” launched in October 2013 after 366 migrants died in a shipwreck off the coast of Lampedusa.
For while “Mare Nostrum” “saved tens of thousands of migrants,” it was also very costly for Italy: 9 million euros per month. Italy realized that, among its European partner countries, few contributed financially, and moreover, many criticized it for having created “a pull factor.”
As a result, Angelino Alfano, the Italian Interior Minister, proposed that another operation take the place of “Mare Nostrum.” Funded by Frontex, the European border surveillance agency, the “Triton” operation thus plans that Italian ships will no longer, as was the case, go closest to the Libyan coast to find shipwrecked people but will await the order to intervene from their own territorial waters.
Gil Arias, the head of Frontex, is convinced that the end of “Mare Nostrum” will reduce the number of fugitives, and consequently the number of deaths, in the Mediterranean. This conviction is opposed by the pessimism of those who, looking across the sea, do not see a decrease in the number of candidates for exile. They fear that smugglers will respond in their own way to a withdrawal of rescue ships: by simply sinking a boat containing hundreds of people, as they did in September.
The dossier published by six European newspapers aims to “dismantle myths about immigration” and emphasizes it as an “opportunity,” because immigrants are the “indispensable engines of our economic system.”
Indeed, the crisis has increased the perception that they are a threat to the standard of living and social resources. But on the contrary, immigration is an essential source of opportunities to ensure the exit from the crisis and the preservation of European preeminence on the global stage, which requires, once and for all, a common immigration policy.
