More than 56 thousand illegal migrants arrived on the Italian coast since the beginning of the year, the authors of the publication in the Italian edition Il Giornale have calculated. Costs for their maintenance may cost Italian taxpayers more than € 2 billion this year alone.
According to the Italian Interior Ministry, since January 1, much more migrants arrived in the country than during the same period last year, when from early January to late August on the Italian coast landed less than 39 thousand migrants. In 2020, fewer than 19,000 migrants were recorded in the first eight months of the year.
In August of this year alone, more than 15,000 people arrived in Italy from the sea. Many of them were processed on August 27, when 1,909 migrants were registered in less than a day. Almost all of them were on the southern island of Lampedusa. Several times in August, more than a thousand people each day arrived on the shores of Sicily and Calabria.
According to the publishing group of the House of Berlusconi, most of the people docked on ships to the coast are “illegal immigrants who have no right to international protection, that is, asylum.”
As for costs, according to previously released figures, 119,000 immigrants came to Italy in 2017 under the Paolo Gentiloni-led government. Their benefits cost the country € 4.4 billion. According to calculations by Il Giornale, if almost 57 thousand people arrived in Italy this year by the end of August, the annual cost of maintaining them would be at least € 2 billion.
Besides, they point out in Il Giornale, now we should also take into account that testing, quarantine and possible treatment because of the coronavirus of the arrivals, will be a huge additional cost. Those who arrive in Lampedusa and other islands will be placed in quarantine ships for two weeks. The vessels’ operating costs cost €36,000 a day. The state will pay €30 per day for care for each person placed in quarantine. One quarantine vessel can hold up to nine hundred people at a time. In the first eight months of 2022, the amount spent on quarantine vessels reached two to three billion, of which “zero euros came from the European Union,” Il Giornale noted.