Europe’s Migratory Pressure Cooker
I’m in Italy this week, which is no hardship. Slightly colder than I’d like but amply compensated by great food, great wine and beautiful women. Well, one woman in particular; gorgeous Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. She may have the body of a weak and feeble woman (looks OK to me though) but that is amply compensated by the biggest pair of testicles (figuratively speaking) of any other European leader, perhaps matched only by Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary.
Yet some parts of Italy are becoming overrun with migrants, mainly from North Africa. Here in Genoa, where I work, they pester you in restaurants selling red roses and down in the port areas selling crap trinkets that nobody in their right mind would want to buy. They have a scam here; one I have witnessed (and fallen for) in Istanbul.
They drop something from their tray of crap, making sure that a gullible looking visitor is walking behind. Gullible visitor does the decent thing, picks it up and runs after the seller. He expresses gratitude but also tries to sell the trinket to you on the grounds that you have touched it. I don’t know why more of these guys don’t end up head first in the harbour.
I observed them doing it one year when I was here and the next year warned a couple not to pick something up that had been dropped, letting them know it was a scam. They didn’t pick it up, and the seller had to go back and pick it up himself. He then ran after me asking me aggressively if I ‘had a problem’. I said no, but informed him that he would have one if he didn’t ‘fuck off’. That seemed to work.
I’ve written in these pages about the problem in the Lombard region town of Brescia which, truly, is overrun by North African migrants. They simply don’t take ‘no’ for an answer, or pass on if you try to wave them away. They ruin al fresco dining by standing next to you, towering over you and expecting you’ll give in. I, however, have a secret weapon to deploy in the shape of Mrs Watson who, by no means has the body (or the mind) of a weak and feeble woman. I try remonstrating but she simply shouts, all without making eye contact, at them to ‘go away’ at the top of her voice. That works followed by a lecture to me from my wife about being more assertive in future.
So, what is gorgeous Giorgia doing about it? It seems that, along with the leaders of Greece, Spain and Cyprus, she has convinced the EU that these countries are under ‘migratory pressure’ and must offload their unwanted visitors on other EU countries. Said countries either take them or pay Italy, Greece, Spain and Cyprus €20,000 for each asylum seeker they do not take.
That ought to quieten a few of the European virtue signallers about migration. It has a touch of genius about it. I can’t make up my mind now if I am glad we left the EU or not. There is no clear definition of migratory pressure, and therefore I am not sure if we would benefit or lose from this arrangement.
Row, Row, Row Your Boat—Straight to Dover
Meantime, with respect to asylum seekers in the UK it is business as usual. Like all recent Home Secretaries, Tory and Labour, Shabana Mahmood talks tough and delivers nothing. Since she arrived at the Home Office, 10,000 small boat migrants have arrived on our shores with 2,000 crossings in four days recently.
So here we are: Meloni flexing her muscles in Rome, Mahmood floundering in Dover, and Brussels trying to put a price on asylum seekers. Everyone’s under ‘migratory pressure’, but no one seems to be moving in the right direction. The boats keep coming, the bureaucrats keep meeting, and the cities of Europe and the UK remain overrun by scroungers. Perhaps Giorgia’s blend of glamour and grit is what Europe needs; a leader who can smile sweetly while sending invoices to the rest of the continent. Meanwhile, I’ll settle for another glass of Chianti and…is that a trinket seller I see coming towards me?
Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.
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(Photograph: governo.it, CC BY 3.0 IT <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/it/deed.en>, via Wikimedia Commons)
Clickbait, Dr Watson..?