One in five places in Italian reception centers was empty as of December 2021, a report by ActionAid has found. The numbers confirm the non-existence of a reception emergency, a rhetoric which has been revived recently, the organization said.
There has been neither an invasion of migrants nor a collapse of centers hosting them throughout Italy, according to the non-governmental organization ActionAid. Rather, the migrant reception system in the country is amidst an emergency simply because of a lack of planning and transparency, concludes ActionAid in a report released February 16.
The report, which aims to provide a 'map' of migrant reception throughout the country and was released in Italian under the name "Il Vuoto dell'Accoglienza" ("The Reception Gap"), found that empty places in migrant centers in the country totalled 20,235 -- or 20.7% of all available ones -- as of December 31, 2021.
Between 2018 and 2021, empty spots averaged 20%, with a peak of 27% in 2019.
Data belies claims of Sicily as 'EU refugee camp'
The confirmation of the non-existence of an emergency caused by an exceedingly high number of migrant arrivals -- according to the report drawn up by ActionAid and Openpolis -- is shown by the case of Sicily, which in recent months the Meloni government claimed is acting as the "refugee camp of Europe."
The situation as of December 31, 2021 showed 30.5% of places empty in the regional system including the CAS, hotspot, and SAI centers on the island.
From Sicily to Friuli-Venezia Giulia, the two Italian border regions where most of the arrivals in the country are seen, there are not enough places in the SAI public system.
However, even when there are places, they are not necessarily filled.
Some 29.5% of the posts activated in the Italian SAI system were empty as of December 31, 2021.
"With a slight increase in arrivals of migrating people in our country, in 2022 some 105,000 migrating people disembarked in Italy. This figure is rising but far from the high number seen in 2016, when the number was exactly double. Over the past year, the rhetoric of a system on the verge of collapse has been revived, while ordinary reception remains an illusion," ActionAid reported.
'Fewer places, focus on continuing emergency a choice'
The effects of the security decree, according to the organization, produced a constant growth in the emergency approach in response to an entirely normal phenomenon that is small compared with the Italian population, totalling only 0.13% of the total.
In 2021, some 8,699 facilities were active, while in 2018 there had been 12,275 centers, with over 3,500 closed in the intervening years: a reduction of 29.1%.
Also in 2021, the number of places available in the system totalled just over 97,000, compared with 169,471 in 2018 -- of which, however, 60.9% were in the CAS special reception system.
There were almost 63,000 places in the CAS and initial reception systems compared with 34,000 in the SAI reception and integration system.
These data show, according to ActionAid, "the choice to focus on an unending emergency, since places are being systematically reduced and never as the law on paths to true integration would like."
To this is added the fact that, out of a total of 65,700 places lost in the special centers, facilities with fewer than 20 places are those that lost the largest number of places between 2018 and 2021: almost 24,000 fewer places in small CAS.
This is a sign of a "lack of investment in widespread reception and the deliberate choice to continue to maintain large concentrations of people [in places] with insufficient services or entirely lacking in them, such as courses in the Italian language, protection and linguistic mediation as well as support in jobseeking."