Giorgia Meloni Gets a Reality Check on Immigration

After decades talking tough on immigration and a year after becoming Italy’s most right-wing prime minister since the Second World War, Giorgia Meloni finds herself dealing with a surge in arrivals from Africa that is sorely testing her electoral pledge to keep irregular migrants away from Italian shores.

With political instability, war, poverty, and global warming plaguing much of Africa and the Middle East, more than 140,000 migrants have already reached Italy by boat this year, almost twice as many as in the whole of 2022. Thousands more lost their lives during the journey. Last month, 7,000 people arrived over just a couple of days in Lampedusa, a small Italian island between Malta and Tunisia that has become a flash point of Europe’s migrant crisis, overwhelming reception facilities there.

As the European Union reels from Islamist attacks in the French city of Arras and in Brussels, which highlighted the shortcomings of its migration system, and amid heightened security concerns linked to the war between Israel and Hamas, Meloni’s immigration woes show the struggles of populist leaders with so-called easy solutions confronted with the reality of government. More than 70 percent of Italians believe that Meloni has done less than she had promised on immigration, and 66 percent say the government is not capable of handling the issue.

“This is a big problem for Meloni,” said Matteo Villa, a senior research fellow at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies. “The government is under a lot of pressure.” 

Right-wing populists around the world are often accused of selling simplistic, unrealistic fixes to complex problems, especially immigration. Former U.S. President Donald Trump never did build the wall, though his successor still aims to do so. Britain continues to be reached by tens of thousands of irregular migrants every year well after pro-Brexit right-wingers convinced it to break away from the EU to “take back control” of its borders. France’s centrist President Emmanuel Macron repeatedly trounced far-right leader Marine Le Pen in presidential debates by laying bare the incoherence of her program. 

Italy, meanwhile, is the main point of arrival for migrants leaving from countries such as Libya and Tunisia in a bid to reach Europe by sea. During last year’s electoral campaign, Meloni claimed that “illegal immigration threatens citizens’ security and quality of life” and promised to stem the influx. Her proposals included establishing an EU “naval blockade” off North Africa’s coasts as well as setting up EU immigration centers in Africa to evaluate people’s asylum requests there.

One year on, Meloni’s government and her voters are facing a harsh reality check. 

An Italy-sponsored deal struck by the EU and Tunisia in the summer, entailing the payment of hundreds of millions of euros to the country in exchange for its help to stop departures, appears to be faltering, with Tunisian strongman Kais Saied saying this month that he will not accept any “charity.”

Meanwhile, despite some vague pledges from the European Commission to step up border surveillance, the kind of massive military operation that would be required to “blockade” large stretches of Africa’s Mediterranean coasts is nowhere near to becoming reality. Finally, repatriations of failed asylum-seekers, which over the past decade hovered at a dismal 18 percent of all those ordered to leave Italy, have only slightly grown on Meloni’s watch compared to last year.

In a bid to maintain support from hard-line voters, the Italian government—which includes Meloni’s post-fascist Brothers of Italy party, as well as the far-right League and the conservative Forza Italia—has resorted to a mix of blame game and headline-grabbing announcements.

Senior right-wing figures recently lambasted Germany over its public funding to a nongovernmental organization rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean, which the Italian government says incentivizes human trafficking. The NGO’s ship has rescued and disembarked 753 people in Italy this year, barely 0.6 percent of total sea arrivals, yet Meloni formally complained to her German counterpart, Olaf Scholz, with a letter leaked to the press, while a top League member alleged that the German left-wing government was seeking to make Meloni’s cabinet look bad by “filling us up with illegals.”

But Meloni’s government has done more than rant. Over the past year, it has approved a slate of measures including tougher punishments for smugglers, stricter procedures to grant humanitarian protection, and more detention centers and longer detention periods for rejected asylum-seekers awaiting deportation.

“For years, center-left governments have simply been passive toward a phenomenon that, on the contrary, we are governing,” said Sara Kelany, a member of parliament with Brothers of Italy. 

Critics say most of these actions will achieve little but make asylum-seekers even more miserable than they already are. “Initial reception is being blended with a detention system,” said Fabrizio Coresi, a migration expert at Action Aid, a human rights NGO. And due to the lack of agreements between Italy and many of the migrants’ countries of origin, rejected asylum-seekers often can’t be deported, and after being locked up for a certain period, they are simply released. The government has also run into legal trouble, facing adverse rulings in recent weeks on parts of its asylum policy.

“These are measures adopted with an eye on the government’s base, rather than actual solutions,” said Lorena Stella Martini, a migration analyst based in Milan.

Meloni may be achieving better results on the European level, where she can take some credit with her electorate for putting the migrant issue back on top of the agenda. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen accompanied Meloni to Tunisia over the summer and visited Lampedusa last month, aligning herself with the Italian prime minister on the need for urgent action to reduce arrivals and promising “a coordinated response.”

The EU is also making progress on a new pact on immigration, which entails stricter procedures for asylum-seekers coming from countries deemed safe, looser rules to expel rejected applicants, and the transfer of thousands of migrants from front-line countries, such as Italy, Greece, and Spain, to other member states—which would otherwise have to pay thousands of euros for every asylum-seeker they refuse to take. 

“For the first time in years, the majority of European countries are converging toward the Italian stance,” said Kelany, the Italian parliament member.

It might be less than a blessing. Experts note that the deal, which confirms the rule that most migrants should be processed by the country of first arrival, is less of an Italian triumph than an own goal. “Meloni’s diplomatic victory is being able to show that everybody in the EU now accepts that the objective is curbing irregular immigration,” said Villa, the research fellow, “but then when you look at the policies that are being discussed [from an Italian perspective], if they were actually implemented, it would be a disaster.”

And yet, for all the grumbling over her handling of immigration, Meloni’s party continues to top the polls with an almost 10-point lead. That might be because Italy’s so-called migrant crisis is not as bad as it seems. Since many migrants end up moving on to other countries, over the past decade, the total number of foreigners in Italy has actually remained stable. Italy has half as many residents born outside the EU as Germany, and 2 million fewer than France, which has only a slightly larger population.

Italy could even use more immigration: Over the summer, Meloni’s government quietly approved the entry of almost half a million non-EU workers by the end of 2025 to fill gaps in the Italian labor market.

The bigger question is how long her voters’ patience will last. “Despite the talk of stopping immigration flows and carrying out mass expulsions of irregular migrants, neither one will happen or is even possible,” said Martini, the expert from Milan.