Europe Faces New Refugee Woes as Italian Rightists Declare That ‘Defending Borders Is Not a Crime’

To the list of things in which Italy often takes the lead — fast cars, design, and fashion, to name a few — add one more: management of the refugee crisis. The new rallying cry from the Italy’s Northern League party is “defending borders is not a crime.” Not only is that message reesonating as Europe faces a fresh influx of refugees, but from the Middle East to America it underscores how there is no security without border security. The leader of the League is Matteo Salvini, who serves as the deputy prime minister in a coalition government with Prime Minister Meloni. Signora Meloni and her Brothers of Italy party have been widely credited with successfully steering Italy through the migrant crisis, even as — or is it because? — the country’s long Mediterranean coastline leaves it more exposed to illegal arrivals than many other EU member states. No doubt sheer exasperation with the EU’s ineffectual immigration policies played a role in uniting a gathering of right-leaning, anti-immigrant parties in the northern Italian town of Pontida on Sunday. The choice of that city for the parley was symbolic — the Oath of Pontida was taken in April 1167, securing a military alliance of five Italian cities against the Germanic Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa. On Sunday, instead of Milan, Lodi, Ferrara, Piacenza and Parma there was in addition to Mr. Salvini the Dutchman Geert Wilders, leader of the Party for Freedom, Hungarian Viktor Orbán, the Austrian Marlene Marlene Swazek of the FPÖ — fresh off the heels of that party’s parliamentary victory — plus the leader of the far right Portuguese Chega party, a spokesperson for Spain’s Vox parties, and by video, Jordan Bardella of France’s National Rally. Mr. Salvini has rallied fellow Eurosceptic politicians before but the stakes are getting higher as the refugee crisis careers out of control. On Saturday alone, nearly a thousand refugees crossed the English Channel in small boats that set off illegally from the French coast. Four persons perished trying to make the crossing. Those migrant arrivals bring the total for the year to 26,612 compared to 25,330 last year. That situation has left the embattled British prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, so adrift that he’s been getting schooled by Ms. Meloni on how to manage refugee overflow. Judging by the Labor government’s persistent inability to effectively patrol the British coast, it appears that Sir Keir has a lot more homework ahead of him.Elsewhere, alarm bells are going off. French authorities have been quietly warning for weeks that ongoing turmoil in the Middle East today will spell increased migrant pressure in the weeks and months ahead. In addition to Palestinian Arabs seeking an exit from Gaza, there is now the question of thousands of Lebanese fleeing to Syria. In 2015 and 2016 Germany had to cope, and not very well, with more than a million Syrian asylum seekers. The recent rise of anti-immigrant parties in eastern Germany led the government to impose border checks, flying in the face of Brussels’ longstanding conventions on passport-free travel within the Schengen area.The parties who convened at Pontida are part of the right-leaning Patriots for Europe, which is the third largest group in the European Parliament. It is led by Mr. Bardella. That young Frenchman, while hewing to his Gallic patriotic principles, is given to making measured remarks about what he and his party perceive as the threat to national identity posed by illegal immigration.Hungary’s Mr. Orban, for his part, is far less restrained. In Italy, he said that “if they continue to punish us, we will transport the migrants from Budapest to Brussels and we will bring them to their [the bureaucrats’] offices,” adding “We must not leave Brussels but enter forcefully, it must be occupied, taken away from the bureaucrats and given back to the European people.”That feisty declaration dovetails with the fighting words of Mr. Salvini, who said that he was launching a “Holy alliance of the European peoples” as a bulwark to what he has called “the Islamic invasion.” It is more than a soundbite that he seeks. “The recipe for the next few years is not about granting more citizenships or giving them away as quickly as possible,” he said. “The priority for the League is to revoke the citizenship of those who commit crimes.”Mr. Wilders, for his part, said that “the tsunami of mass illegal immigration makes us foreigners in our own home.” Ms. Svazek, of Austria’s newly resurgent FPÖ, said that “Matteo Salvini is putting the security of his country above all other interests and is thus defending the values of Europe.”

Europe Faces New Refugee Woes as Italian Rightists Declare That ‘Defending Borders Is Not a Crime’

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