This country has cut illegal boat crossings – but its lessons for the UK are bleak

When you fly into the Italian island of Lampedusa, it looks like a lone dot with nothing but flat sea in all directions until the horizon. The Tunisian coast is 70 miles away, and it is terrifying to think of migrants crossing the expanse in tiny, overcrowded boats.

In September 2023, about 8,000 of them arrived in Lampedusa over 48 hours – more than the island’s entire population. It was a crisis for the government of Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, who had campaigned on a promise to stop the boats.

Meloni flew in, and a crowd of locals blocked her motorcade, angry and scared that their island was being overwhelmed.

I watched as she ignored her bodyguards and got out of her car to confront them. She told them she understood their concerns. Then she held a news conference with the European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen. She repeated her campaign line that she would not let Italy become “Europe’s refugee camp”. Local people told me they didn’t expect much to change. The small boats seemed as unstoppable as the tides.

Two years on, Meloni has managed to cut illegal migration to Italy dramatically. Almost 160,000 migrants arrived in small boats in 2023 – last year it was around 66,000, and this year it is expected to be about the same.

Keir Starmer paid Meloni a visit in September and praised her “remarkable progress” in beating the gangs sending migrants to Italy in small boats. So, what lessons could there be for the UK from Italy’s success in – as Meloni put it – breaking the “chain of human trafficking in the Mediterranean”?

Almost the first thing the Meloni government did was to make it more difficult for NGOs and charities to rescue migrants from the sea. After these rescue vessels picked up one small boat, they were not allowed to search for more. They were directed to distant northern ports in Italy. There were big fines for those who broke the rules, and ships could be impounded.

Meloni’s critics say this costs lives. In Lampedusa, from time to time, bodies wash up on tourist beaches. They are buried in a special section of the town’s walled cemetery, the graves marked by crosses made from pieces of their boats.

Meloni’s response was that the Mediterranean will be a graveyard as long as people smugglers are allowed to do business. In February, in a speech to Italy’s police commissioners, she went through the figures: 2,526 people were reported dead or missing in 2023, the height of Italy’s small boats crisis. By last year, with fewer crossings, the number of dead and missing was put at 1,695.

“This means something simple,” she said. “Stamping out trafficking is the only way to reduce the number of people who lose their lives… this is the result we should be most proud of.”

When she was campaigning for office, Meloni promised to mount a naval blockade in the Mediterranean. This would very likely have been illegal under international law and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). In government, she has been more pragmatic.

The most important thing she did to stem the flow of migrants was to make deals with Libya and Tunisia to turn back the boats. These countries were traditionally the main departure points to Europe. In effect, they are now mounting a blockade on behalf of the European Union. In return, Tunisia has been promised about €1bn (about £875.7m) in aid, and Libya is getting more than half a billion. The result has been cruelty on a vast scale.

Amnesty International published a report this month accusing Tunisia’s coastguard of systematic violence. Migrants said they had been attacked with batons and tear gas while at sea. Their boats had been rammed.

This has been standard practice for years, according to the report. It quotes “Céline”, a woman from Cameroon who tried to cross in 2023. Coastguards came alongside and kept hitting their flimsy boat with sharpened poles until they pierced the hull, and it sank. There were two women and three babies without life jackets. She said: “We saw them drown and then we could not see the bodies any more. I have never been so scared.”

Dry land is just as dangerous. Amnesty has documented some 70 mass expulsions from Tunisia over the past two years. Thousands of migrants – including pregnant women and children – have been dumped in the desert on the border with Algeria, with no water or shelter.

Libya is worse. In 2023, a UN fact-finding mission said that migrants in Libya faced murder, torture, kidnapping and rape at the hands of security forces and militias. Another UN report found that more than 1,000 migrants disappeared or died in Libya last year. The US State Department estimates that up to 10,000 are being held in official detention centres, with uncounted thousands more at unofficial sites run by militias.

In the face of these claims, the Meloni government practises an uncompromising realpolitik. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for a Libyan police general named Osama Elmasry Njeem, director of a notorious jail for migrants in Tripoli. In January, police in the Italian city of Turin arrested Njeem. Two days later, they released him. Not only that, he was spirited out of the country and reportedly flown back to Libya on a military aircraft. It appeared that Meloni’s government did not want anything to jeopardise its deal with Libya.

Giulio Meotti, a journalist for the conservative newspaper Il Foglio, told me the rest of Europe has now caught up with Meloni. No one can imagine a leader today opening their borders as Angela Merkel did in Germany a decade ago.

The Italian public wanted Fortress Europe, Meotti said. “They feel their country disappearing”, squeezed between a low birth rate and high immigration. He also quoted a French prime minister from the late ’80s and early ’90s, Michel Rocard, who said: “We cannot open our arms to all the misery of the world.”

Meloni had the sense not to employ such rhetoric, Meotti said, instead she used pragmatic means for ideological ends. But her migration policies made her “very, very popular” in Italy.

France is not Libya or Tunisia. The UK cannot simply pay it to intercept and detain asylum seekers at sea – both countries’ actions are constrained by the ECHR. And Italy’s “success” is partly an illusion: many migrants have simply been pushed west.

As numbers arriving in Italy fell, they surged in Spain and Greece. One NGO said 9,757 migrants died on the Atlantic route to Spain last year.

As I arrived in Lampedusa two years ago, they had just held a funeral for a newborn baby who died on the crossing, a small white coffin interred in the town cemetery.

The mother, a young woman from Cameroon, had clung to the baby’s body for two days and nights, until their boat was found by an Italian Coast Guard vessel. There will be many more such deaths. Italy’s experience tells us what we already know: the problem of illegal migration is not going away, and it will not be easy to solve.

That is the main lesson for the UK.