The EconomistAugust 10th 2019 251A
bdul aziz, a tall, strongly built young
man, falls silent and looks down. He
has been describing how the Taliban
spread their influence through his part of
the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. His
father defied them. “They killed my father,”
he says, tears welling up in his eyes.
The 24-year-old Pakistani farmer is
standing in the courtyard of Malala Yousaf-
zai House, a few hundred metres from the
border between Italy and Slovenia. The
house, a former revenue-guard barracks, is
an initial reception centre for Italy’s unno-
ticed migrants: the thousands who enter
the country by slipping across the heavily
wooded nearby frontier after a gruelling
journey from Asia that sometimes takes
years. Abdul Aziz’s most frightening mo-
ment was on the Iranian-Turkish border
when he came under fire. “They shoot peo-
ple there,” he says.
Once in the Balkans, migrants become
counters in a game of snakes-and-ladders:
Slovenian police who catch people trying
to go across the country send them back
down to Croatia, where they are once more
expelled, to either Serbia or Bosnia. Unde-
terred, most of them simply turn round
and try again. Marco Albanese, who runs
the centre for the Italian Consortium of
Solidarity (ics), an ngo, says some people
he has taken in have been pushed back
across a frontier 15 times.
While Italy’s deputy prime minister and
interior minister, Matteo Salvini, has fo-
cused attention on the arrival by sea of
mostly sub-Saharan African migrants on
the southern coast, larger—though stillmodest—numbers have been entering the
country from the other end. Mr Salvini’s
policy of closing Italy’s ports to ngos’ res-
cue boats has helped more than double
support for his party, the Northern League.
But his achievement is less significant than
he makes out. The previous, centre-left
government had already drastically re-
duced the number of arrivals from the
Mediterranean, and some still manage to
get to Italy, usually on fishing boats or
yachts. According to the International Or-
ganisation for Migration, a unbody, in the
year to July 20th, 3,365 people had reached
Italy’s southern shores.
At the ics’s headquarters in Trieste, its
president, Gianfranco Schiavone, says that
over the same period his organisation
alone took in 1,192 people—most of them
from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. That
was almost double the number in the first
seven months of 2018. In June, the increase
prompted Mr Salvini to talk of building a
wall (the frontier is, however, a not incon-
siderable 230km, or 140 miles, long). “We’ll
launch mixed patrols with the Slovenians
in July but, if the flow of migrants doesn’t
stop, then extreme evils require extreme
remedies,” he declared.
The icsis not the only voluntary group
receiving migrants in the area, and Mr
Schiavone notes that their combined total
of perhaps 2,000 arrivals so far this year
takes no account of the many who seek to
avoid all contact with either ngos or theMigrants in Italy
Turning into a trickle
FERNETTI
But that does not stop Matteo Salvini exploiting them
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