Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer leads a roundtable discussion at the Organised Immigration Crime Summit at Lancaster House in central London, March 31, 2025
KEIR STARMER’S anti-refugee summit picks up where the Tories left off in giving unauthorised migration exaggerated status as some kind of national crisis.
Just as Rishi Sunak penned a joint article with Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni calling for a Europe-wide crackdown on irregular arrivals, Meloni took centre-stage by video link today, citing Italy’s use of a third-country processing hub in Albania as a model increasingly adopted across the continent.
Meloni depicts Italy as a pioneer. It is, though not in a good way. It successfully pushed the EU to abolish its last official search-and-rescue service in the Mediterranean nearly five years ago and it has led the way too in prosecuting civilian search-and-rescue missions it smears as people-smugglers.
As the Public and Commercial Services union and Care4Calais recently urged, the easiest way to end criminal people-smuggling operations would be to provide safe routes for people to claim asylum, perhaps through an extension of the scheme for Ukrainian refugees to people of other backgrounds.
There is no reason why victims of one war should be privileged over victims of others, and Britain bears responsibility for many of those wars. Yvette Cooper’s own reference to gangs working from the “hills of Kurdistan to the money markets of Kabul” cites two countries devastated by invasions we took part in, Iraq and Afghanistan.
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The international refugee crisis is driven by war, poverty and climate change.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer take a walk after meeting to discuss migration in Rome | Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images. All rights reserved
There’s no smuggling ‘kingpin’ to take down. Instead, Labour’s security rhetoric risks putting more people in danger
Labour lost no time burying the Conservatives’ tawdry Rwanda plan in favour of something a little more, well, Churchillian. In July, as he welcomed European leaders to Winston’s birthplace of Blenheim Palace, Keir Starmer framed border security not as some nationalist vote-fishing expedition but rather as a pragmatic British undertaking “at the heart of the Government’s reset with Europe”.
It would also involve fighting them on the beaches. Gangs would be suitably smashed, he told his guests, by a new Border Security Command armed with “counter terrorism-style powers”. Elsewhere Starmer has also enthused over Giorgia Meloni’s ‘upstream’ fight against irregular migration — including offshoring asylum processing to Albania and outsourcing crackdowns to Tunisia.
So far, so familiar. If there’s anything European political leaders of different stripes and nationalities have united around since the 1990s, it’s more border security. But what will a counterterror-style crackdown actually achieve this time around?
Is Labour offering anything new on migration?
For some of those relieved to see Rishi Sunak exit stage right, his meaningless “stop the boats” sign tucked under his arm, there are grounds for optimism. The counterterror rhetoric, they say, hides humane openings elsewhere, especially when it comes to breaking the massive backlog of asylum cases. Respecting the European Court of Human Rights also looks like a welcome return to normality – and legality.
Starmer has further promised that his approach will be more cost-efficient. That’s easy enough to believe, as it’s hard to imagine anything more wasteful than spending “£700m to persuade four volunteers to go to Rwanda,” as Starmer himself described it. Supporters will add that smuggling is a rapacious business. Going after its economics is key, as is respectful collaboration with partner states rather than grandstanding. Reinstating EU returns (lost after Brexit), cracking down on smugglers, and expediting asylum cases will work where ‘invasion’ rhetoric failed.
In this take, Starmer offers strategic “competence with compassion” that also helps placate the tabloids. It’s a method that, if it works out, means everybody wins except the cold-hearted smugglers.
Not so fast. A brief look at the past decades’ border dynamics suggests that Starmer’s initiatives may well end up being as gimmicky as those they replace. If politicians genuinely want to stop profiteering as people drown in the English Channel or the Mediterranean Sea, they must first understand the drivers of migration and the smuggling business. Otherwise they will simply fail again – with more lives lost, and even harder rhetoric to come from the hard right.
Smuggling 101: supply and demand
It’s peculiar how difficult it is for mainstream politicians, who are otherwise so keen on market economics, to learn that human smuggling is a market driven by demand. It responds to incentives, and its strongest incentive by far is the disappearance of legal routes. The market is further buoyed by crackdowns of the kind seen around the Channel Tunnel in recent years. The displacement of routes has predictably increased danger and desperation – and thus reliance on professional smugglers. The border security system perversely feeds on the very problem it ostensibly combats.
True, deterrence-signalling measures may put a damper on the market – for a while. Cue Starmer’s nod towards Italy, where Meloni and her authoritarian Tunisian partner claim credit for bringing down maritime migration this past year. But sooner or later, the market will re-emerge unless the underlying dynamics and drivers are addressed.
Ever-tougher approaches targeting the supposed ‘kingpins’ have merely shifted the modus operandi
Reproducing new versions of the same threat and then combating them again is bad enough. But Starmer’s reference to counterterrorism — now accompanied by a doubling of the funding for the new Border Security Command — raises additional red flags.
Consider the US Homeland Security behemoth spawned by the George W. Bush administration after 9/11. Rather than changing dynamics at the US-Mexico border – the stage of spectacular enforcement all through the 1990s – it worsened it.
The cartels started playing an unpaid role in ‘prevention through deterrence’. At the same time, border crackdowns and technology imported from the war on terror pushed migrants away from smaller smuggling operations and into the hands of larger, more predatory players with the necessary economic margins.
Yet that inconvenient reality was never really acknowledged. As I heard some years ago, Customs and Border Protection bureaucrats repeatedly magicked up models showing their method ‘works’ by denting the revenue of smugglers and ramping up deterrence. It didn’t. Instead it reproduced a deadly dynamic and spawned fresh political crises.
Or consider Italy itself. Rome has deployed anti-mafia methods against smugglers, but it has little to show for these efforts except perverse results such as jailing a presumed “Al Capone of the desert”, who was later released in a case of mistaken identity. As the man’s lawyer said, “After three years, finally the judge confirmed what we have been saying: we had a farmer in jail and a smuggler at large.” The prosecutors kept insisting they had the right man, waging a war less on smugglers than on reality.
Fighting an elusive enemy
For years, ever-tougher approaches targeting the supposed ‘kingpins’ have merely shifted the modus operandi, in Libya and elsewhere. Instead of piloting a boat, the smugglers make passengers steer it. The latter then bear the legal — or lethal — consequences when it is seized or sinks.
People on the move, of course, also adapt their behaviour to crackdowns. As one Senegalese man explained to me 15 years ago, before his wooden fishing boat approached the Canary Islands, he threw “food, GPS and the compass into the sea”. The shift in tactics in response to enforcement has hugely increased the risk, pushing responsibility of the vessels onto migrants who cannot navigate or do not want to be seen doing so.
It is possible that Labour’s smuggling crackdown will not get stuck either in the bureaucratic swamp of ‘Homeland Security’, or get distracted by the catch-the-small-fry fracas. But its own alarmist rhetoric, combined with tabloid and Tory pressure, feed bureaucratic incentives to produce ‘results’ – and these are the easiest ways of showing such results. So beware the hyperbole: it makes meaningful ‘results’ more difficult to achieve.
Underneath all the tactics and rhetoric, however, a more fundamental analytical problem is lurking. Unless the threat has been correctly diagnosed, there’s little chance the remedy will work.
Starmer’s approach is based on the idea that smuggling is in the hands of very well-organised, transnational crime. That there is, somewhere, a kingpin to take down. But while it is true that human smuggling has become more predatory, profitable and professional as the market has grown with each short-sighted crackdown, that model is, at absolute best, extraordinarily incomplete.
The outsourcing of draconian migration controls has benefited repressive state and para-statal actors, while increasing the very dangers that drive people to move
Precision is needed, not alarmism. On the Spanish borders, for instance, politicians, police and reporters for years talked of ‘mafias’, even while small operators and migrants themselves kept organising crossings.
‘Upstream’, in North Africa and the Sahel, the authorities themselves are involved. They benefit from the security largesse provided by their European ‘partners’ in fighting irregular migration, and from the ever-increasing bribes needed to evade their own controls. Rather than a straightforward ‘battle’ between clear adversaries, we see here more of a symbiosis between the border security and smuggling businesses.
The outsourcing of draconian migration controls has benefited repressive state and para-statal actors, such as Libya’s militias, while increasing the very dangers that are driving people to move with the aid of smugglers. If we account for this political dynamic, Meloni’s ‘success’ looks fragile indeed. It is based on a drop of arrivals in 2024 from the previous year. Yet the chaos in Italian ports in 2023 was, to no small extent, the result of Tunisia’s president using African migrants as a bargaining chip with Europe.
Kelly Greenhill has called it “weapons of mass migration”. It’s something the EU says it wants to combat. Instead, European leaders seem to be rewarding it.
The smuggler factory
A ‘counterterror’ approach to smuggling, combined with further reliance on non-European buffer states, risks further skewing the border-crossing market from smaller players to more organised and rapacious ones while shifting the risks from smugglers to their increasingly desperate passengers. This, in turn, risks fuelling the trend towards captive markets that we see today from Libya to northern Mexico.
It’s been said many times that a ‘war on smugglers’ swiftly turns into a war on migrants. As David Keen and I show in our book Wreckonomics, politicians have kept learning the wrong lessons from their various short-sighted ‘wars’ against smuggling, terror, crime and drugs.
They keep choosing to go in hard with the security theatre and target the symptoms not the causes, hoping to reap short-term electoral rewards. They keep producing figures showing that the ‘fight’ is succeeding – and numbers may even really go down for a bit. But they don’t create sustained change. Look at the long term and we see above all a displacement of routes and methods – whether in the Channel, the Mediterranean or across the Rio Grande – with a corresponding boost for the smuggling market.
Starmer may still play smart and prioritise reinstating European returns, speeding up processing, and going after the big players and the money. The UK does not have Italy’s Mediterranean border, after all, and its main ‘outsourcing’ partner is France not Libya.
But in this context, it’s all the more worrying that we hear the language of counterterror and ‘upstream’ controls dominate the messaging. If the measures don’t match the problem, and if the relevant actors themselves remain poorly understood, the problem will simply keep being reproduced — as indicated by the past two decades of Labour and Tory enforcement efforts around the Channel.
For a more visionary political figure there is surely a chance here to offer a different kind of security
To Starmer’s supporters — eyeing tabloids and Faragists on the warpath — the gambit may still look appealing, or at least like some kind of lesser evil. Yet here awaits one further fallacy. For if there’s one other group besides smugglers that has predictably and consistently gained from ‘securitisation’ over the past decades, it is the far right.
Offering a lighter version of hard-right securitisation simply increases voter appetite for the full-fat version. The political appeal of repeatedly announcing an ‘emergency’ or ‘invasion’ is not based on numbers. Channel crossings, we know, are vanishingly small relative to overall immigration into the UK. But if the big politics of ‘small boats’ is not driven by numbers, the corollary is that even if Starmer were to get numbers down temporarily, the appetite for more border security would remain.
Starmer’s problem today is that of the left in general, which increasingly finds itself trapped in security logics — something we’ve equally seen in the recent US elections. This is unfortunate, since for a more visionary political figure there is surely a chance here to offer a different kind of security.
Instead of dismissing legal pathways, for instance, these could be reframed as bringing humanity, control and predictability to migration policy — while fundamentally creating a disincentive to use smugglers, as border guards themselves often insist.
Instead of trumpeting ‘counterterror’, there is scope for a sophisticated overarching strategy against organised crime and exploitative actors that targets the regulations and loopholes that these actors feed upon. This means working inland, where the exploitation of migrant labour, for instance, is a huge and neglected problem. Waiting in the wings is also a much wider conversation about how politicians’ economic choices and foreign policy fuel migration and displacement.
But all this involves open democratic debate and oversight. Counterterror approaches have tended to do the opposite: fuel a fear-based politics, increase secrecy, sidestep audits, benefit the big criminal players and corrupt partner authorities. They also unfailingly feed the very crises forcing people to leave countries such as Afghanistan in the first place.
A Churchillian rhetoric of unity-through-security is tempting. So is the language of counterterror. But to end with a warning from the failed war on terror, let’s perhaps listen to Richard C. Holbrooke, the US special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, who said: “We may be fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country.”
Starmer may at least be in the right country. But if he insists on misunderstanding the problem he will confront the wrong enemy yet again.
Explore the rest of the series
This series looks at how the UK, EU and bordering countries are increasingly treating migration as a criminal offence, and targeting migrants and solidarity actors in the name of ‘anti-smuggling’ and ‘border control’.
Caught in the net: how migration became a criminal offence Melissa Pawson, Vicky Taylor
Police wait for migrants to disembark in the port of Catania, Italy, 2023 | Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images. All rights reserved
Deploying ‘anti-mafia’ tactics against migrants and those standing in solidarity with them is solving nothing
In November 2023, Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, gathered the country’s top prosecutors at the headquarters of the powerful anti-mafia and anti-terrorism directorate, the DNAA. The far-right leader flattered them, boasting about the Italian judiciary’s global prestige.
“Italy used to export mafia,” she said. “Now it exports anti-mafia.”
She was trying to smooth over tensions around her government’s plans to limit the powers of organised crime investigators. Yet there was more to Meloni’s statement than she perhaps realised.
Over the past decade, the DNAA shifted focus from fighting Italy’s mafia to tackling undocumented migration. The directorate became central to Europe’s response – a hub for national police forces and European agencies like Frontex and Europol to exchange and refine anti-migration tactics.
The DNAA’s success lay in its apparent ability to throw investigative findings behind an idea that politicians were keen to believe: that undocumented migration is essentially a matter of organised crime and should be dealt with as such. A prosecutor in Palermo branded this approach “the Italian job” – but Italy wasn’t alone in this effort.
In recent years, many European border countries have seen an explosion of court cases against people thought to facilitate migration in some way. Driving a dinghy, providing shelter or medical assistance, even receiving a distress call from a sinking boat is now enough to make someone vulnerable to prosecution.
Migrants, as always, have been the main targets. But prosecutors have also set their sights on European activists and aid workers in what can be described as a campaign to criminalise solidarity.
Since 2013 this judicial policy has been turbocharged with unprecedented funding, but its roots stretch back over two decades. The technical and legal groundwork was laid after the fall of the Soviet Union and reinforced following the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States – an inflection point that saw migration become ever more intertwined with security concerns.
The policy has run long enough to be assessed. And, at least at the practical level, it has been a complete failure.
Searching for a mafia to take down
Critical smuggling scholars agree that large, hierarchical smuggling rings are rare. Their contribution to migration flows is insignificant. The vast majority of migration facilitation instead comes from loose chains of actors who do not share a common employer. A migrant finds somebody who can help with a step or two, and then finds someone new to help with the next step, building out this ‘chain’ as they go along.
European prosecutors ignore these inconvenient truths about migration, but that doesn’t change the result. Smuggling ‘kingpins’ are not ending up in the dock, and the people who do are rarely worth the judge’s time.
European governments used to conceal these deals, with investigative journalists scrambling to dig them up. But they are now official policy
The failure of this policy is not lost on its proponents. They are well aware of the reports that confirm these findings. So when it comes to reducing the number of undocumented arrivals, politicians resort to much cruder methods than the formalities of court procedures, such as so-called ‘border externalisation’ policies.
These are bilateral agreements between European states and various foreign entities in what Europe labels transit countries – governments, militias, autocratic rulers, law enforcement bodies, and security services. They typically include provisions for military equipment, technology, training, political support, and fat contracts for European and local companies and aid agencies.
In return, beneficiaries commit to intercepting, incarcerating, or taking back undesired migrants. European governments used to conceal these deals, with investigative journalists scrambling to dig them up. But they are now official policy, having shown some effectiveness in curbing migration flows, at least along specific routes and long enough to scrape through an election year.
So if the campaign against migration and solidarity offers, at best, a short-term dip in movement in some places but no real long term results, why is it pursued with such fervour? Authorities claim it’s about justice: smugglers exploit migrants in distress for profit and migrants infringe on a country’s sovereignty by entering without permission, both of which are morally unacceptable. They can’t just let that slide.
Campaigners take a different view: criminalisation, they argue, serves as a political tool to deflect blame from the real culprits of migrants’ suffering. “Tens of thousands have died at Europe’s borders over the last two decades,” says Sara Traylor, an activist in Palermo. “Policymakers push the false narrative that punishing facilitators of border crossings will solve this crisis. But these deaths stem directly from Europe’s closed doors and neo-colonial policies.”
Making a smuggler
Traylor co-authors “From Sea to Prison,” a report tracking the arrests of individuals accused of being “crew” on small dinghies arriving in Italy. Her group in Palermo is part of the broader European Captain Support network, a coalition of grassroots organisations providing information and legal support to those accused of maritime smuggling.
“Since 2013, nearly 3,000 people have been arrested in Italy alone,” she said. “Thousands more have faced similar fates in Greece and Spain. The UK and France have also stepped up prosecutions for those attempting to cross the Channel.”
The Captain Support network often highlights blatant miscarriages of justice. Their “Free the footballers” campaign seeks to exonerate eight asylum seekers from Libya, Tunisia, Syria and Morocco serving 30-year sentences in Italy. Included among them are professional football players. Arrested in 2015 and accused by the DNAA branch in Catania of steering a dinghy where 49 people suffocated, they were identified by witnesses who received residence permits for their cooperation. Initial testimonies had denied the presence of smugglers.
In court, it emerged that suspects were pre-selected based on their appearance on a military rescue boat. Frontex officers found them “suspicious” due to their clothes, and they had stood out to the Italian police on board “because of their lighter skin”. Witness statements collected by the police were nearly identical, with entire sections copied and pasted, and were largely retracted in court. Interpreters often didn’t speak the right languages.
Yet despite evidence that at least five were paying passengers, their sentences were upheld. A final ruling this April said only a presidential pardon could address the “disparity” between the sentence “and the moral dimension of their actual culpability”.
A volunteer rests as migrants disembark in Salerno, Italy in July 2023 | Ivan Romano/Getty Images. All rights reserved
According to Traylor, this case is not extreme: police interrogations after traumatic crossings, manipulated witness statements, lack of interpreters, inadequate legal defence, and the use of intimidation or inappropriate incentives to secure cooperation are recurrent in smuggling cases.
Traylor doesn’t claim that everyone helped by the Captain Support Network is innocent in a legal sense; a few may have acted for profit, but avoiding profit motives doesn’t prevent convictions. “Criminalised individuals come from diverse backgrounds and motivations,” she said. “The only common factor is that they’re accused of helping someone to cross a border.”
“The term ‘Captains’ restores agency to those on the move, who often don’t see smugglers as morally reprehensible,” she said. “Sometimes, boat drivers are even celebrated as heroes.”
The views Traylor holds today are considered fringe. They were once mainstream.
Shifting perceptions
In 1980, the highest criminal court in Germany heard a peculiar smuggling case. The smuggler was the plaintiff, and was referred to as an “escape helper”. He had sued a refugee for unpaid fees after a failed attempt to transport him from East to West Germany.
The court ruled the fees must be paid with interest, stating the refugee had made “use of his fundamental right to freedom of movement” and that helping someone exercise this right, even for profit, “does not in principle act contrary to morality.”
The court backed the Berlin Senate’s view that smuggling becomes criminal only when “capitalising on the personal distress of others” turns into “a permanent source of considerable income”.
Since then, the notion of what warrants criminal punishment has stretched to absurd extremes. It now includes everything from walking up to a border unaided to being related to someone crossing illegally, or even posting on social media about wanting to cross.
Refugees, once seen as freedom-seekers, have become ‘undesirable’ economic threats
In June 2022, 23 migrants were killed in clashes with Spanish and Moroccan security forces while trying to enter the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Though the victims had reached the border on foot, Pedro Sanchez, the Spanish prime minister, blamed “human trafficking mafias” for the tragedy.
Later that year, Tunisian mothers protesting the mass drowning of migrants were met with a shocking response: Vincent Cochetel, a special envoy for the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR), suggested “symbolically prosecuting parents for putting at risk their children.”
Just weeks ago, the Moroccan government, eager to appease Spain in externalisation talks, arrested 60 teenagers for social media posts about swimming to Ceuta, a Spanish town on the North African coast. They even placed barriers to prevent access to the sea in towns near the enclave.
This massive shift in perceptions is often traced to the post-Soviet era: refugees from the Eastern Bloc pouring into Western Europe, once seen as freedom-seekers, transformed into ‘undesirable’ economic threats. In this period European countries tightened asylum and visa laws, forcing refugees into illegal routes.
By the late 1990s, an influx of mostly Kurdish refugees from Iraq raised alarm in Germany, where politicians started to speak of “illegal immigration organised by criminal gangs” and pressured coastal states like Italy and Greece for tougher action against smugglers. Around the same time, Italy began prosecuting Kurds arriving by boat. And in the UK, a report from the late 1990s found that courts in coastal towns were seeing “two or three trials for facilitating illegal entry every week”, with sentences ranging from one to three years.
This process accelerated dramatically after the 11 September 2001 attacks. In Western political discourse, migrants became increasingly associated with security threats and terrorism. But political rhetoric alone doesn’t explain these changes.
In his seminal study of the subject, The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU, French sociologist Jef Huysmans argued that security agencies played a pivotal role in constructing migration as a criminal threat. Political visions, he noted, rely on “evoking fears and emergencies” while offering “credible methods” to control these insecurities. Security agencies then step in, using their expertise to provide competing solutions to the problems politicians present.
Italy’s DNAA proved to be a master in this game.
Power grab
On 3 October 2013, over 360 people, mostly from Eritrea and Somalia, drowned off the coast of Lampedusa. Authorities ignored their overloaded boat for hours, until a passenger lit a makeshift torch that sparked a fire, capsizing the vessel.
Days later, in an official resolution, EU leaders declared that the tragedy “had shocked all Europeans”. To avoid more deaths, they pledged to “step up the fight against trafficking and smuggling.”
DNAA prosecutors were already at work to make that happen. The previous day they had met in Rome for the first in a series of “coordination meetings to fight maritime illegal immigration”. These meetings came to be attended by Frontex, Europol and Eurojust representatives alongside Italian law enforcement. The DNAA leveraged the credibility it had gained from decimating Cosa Nostra to assert its ability to tackle this new security threat.
That anti-mafia prosecutors could claim jurisdiction over undocumented migration, though, wasn’t a given. Before 2013, the DNAA’s remit was limited to trafficking, where people are forced across borders for exploitation, often through organised networks. Smuggling, however, involves voluntary crossings and is an offence against border laws, not people.
The Lampedusa disaster blurred this line: the journey was so deadly it seemed no one would take it willingly. With the public still emotional and desperate for solutions, the DNAA made the most of this confusion.
Handbooks said investigators should exploit the emotionally charged moments after a rescue, targeting the “weakest subjects” for statements against boat drivers
After the first meeting, the agency published guidelines expanding Italy’s jurisdiction into international waters for anti-smuggling operations. By invoking laws ranging from the slave trade era to the American war on drugs, they framed migration as part of a broader criminal continuum.
These guidelines referenced provisions of the 1958 Geneva Convention allowing high-seas police operations against the slave trade and piracy; the 2002 EU Facilitators Package that criminalises aiding undocumented entry and stay; and even the Reagan-era Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act.
Subsequent governments codified the DNAA’s expanded role. After the 2015 Paris attacks, the agency was granted the anti-terrorism mandate (“thanks to the work we did from 2013 on,” said Franco Roberti, then DNAA chief). Two years later it was assigned migrant smuggling.
With the jurisdictional groundwork in place, the DNAA moved on to securing arrests. Working with police and European navies, they formalised the investigative methods at work in the case of the Libyan football players.
Law enforcement handbooks advised identifying smugglers based on details like clothing and attitude toward the police. They also said investigators should exploit the emotionally charged moments after a rescue, targeting the “weakest subjects” for information and witness statements against boat drivers. Because civil rescue ships operated by NGOs interfered with this activity, in a 2017 coordination meeting attended by EU law enforcement the DNAA top brass discussed charging them with aiding and abetting smuggling.
The arrests made through these methods led to outlandish stories eagerly reported by the media: smugglers branding migrants’ heads with knives, boat drivers tossing a toddler overboard to hinder rescue efforts of their own sinking boat, and human rights activists making under-the-table deals with traffickers. Though debunked in court, these accounts made lasting impressions on the public. And because they targeted people arriving in Italy on dinghies, those arrested weren’t even smugglers or traffickers.
The only high-profile target of the DNAA was the alleged trafficking kingpin Medhanie Yedhego Mered, an Eritrean accused of organising numerous sea journeys from Libya. The investigation, a collaboration between the DNAA and the UK’s National Crime Agency, culminated in a dramatic press conference announcing Mered’s arrest in Sudan.
However, it soon emerged that the man flown to Palermo from Khartoum on a military jet was actually Medhanie Tesfamariam Berhe, a carpenter from Asmara. Prosecutors held him in prison for three years before partly admitting the mistake.
Calogero Ferrara, the DNAA prosecutor behind the case and the proponent of the “Italian job” approach, responded by wiretapping Guardian journalist Lorenzo Tondo, who exposed the error, and later sued him for libel. He recently called to strengthen international legislation against migrant smuggling.
In a 2022 interview, even Franco Roberti, the former DNAA boss, recognised that the anti-migration strategy put in place after the Lampedusa shipwreck was a failure. But, he attributed it to a lack of cooperation from foreign police rather than any conceptual shortcoming. Lessons were not learnt.
Doubling down
After yet another shipwreck killed at least 94 people 150 metres from the Italian shore in February last year, Giorgia Meloni’s government doubled down once again. This time it established unprecedentedly high prison terms for those convicted of smuggling. Last January, she asked the DNAA to start investigating regular migration flows for potential document fraud as well.
Keir Starmer, the UK prime minister, recently visited Italy to learn more about the Italian model of combating irregular migration. At a joint press conference, Meloni said that she and “Starmer agree that the first thing to do is to step up the fight against the trafficking in human beings”. She emphasised that Italy’s strategy was inspired by Giovanni Falcone, the judge murdered by the Sicilian mafia in 1992 shortly after founding the DNAA, and called for a stronger role for Interpol and Europol in anti-smuggling efforts.
Starmer concurred, spelling out the goal of his Italy trip: “to share intelligence, share tactics, shut down smuggler routes, and smash the gangs”.
And around we go.
Explore the rest of the series
This series looks at how the UK, EU and bordering countries are increasingly treating migration as a criminal offence, and targeting migrants and solidarity actors in the name of ‘anti-smuggling’ and ‘border control’.
Over 2,000 people took to the streets of Naples against soaring military spending in Europe and increased repression of dissent as G7 defense ministers convened for high-level talks
Thousands of people took to the streets of Naples on October 19, demonstrating against the G7 military agenda and Italy’s proposed reforms that would limit the freedom to dissent. Protesters, representing a host of organizations including student associations, trade unions, and community centers, rallied against Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government’s policies, demanding a shift in priorities toward social needs instead of military spending. Side by side with the protest in Naples, demonstrations were held in dozens of cities across Italy, as reported by the left political party, Power to the People (Potere al Popolo).
Protesters carrying a banner reading “Cut the weapons, raise the wages!”. Source: Ex OPG occupato – Je so’ pazzo/Facebook
The protest was organized to counter a G7 defense ministers’ meeting that took place in Naples from October 18 to 20, with a focus on global military goals. The meeting was seen by protesters as yet another example of Western countries deepening their involvement in wars, including the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the war in Ukraine, instead of pursuing agendas of social justice and peace. In the lead-up to the meeting, local activists voiced their opposition, stating that “lords of war” were not welcome in their city.
“Never has so much been spent on war, and as a result, war is rampant everywhere,” the associations organizing the march asserted during the preparations. “We refuse to host a meeting in our city that supports the war economy our government has chosen to follow.”
Two central issues dominated the protest in Naples: the West’s support for Israel as it continues to exterminate the people of Gaza and the increasing repression of dissent at home, embodied in Meloni’s proposed security bill. Many protesters pointed out the link between military aggression abroad and domestic policies that seek to criminalize dissent. European countries continue to actively repress solidarity with Palestine and others, like Italy, are doing so while attempting to silence voices against their policies.
The new security bill seeks to impose severe restrictions on protests, including strikes and environmental activism. Progressive associations argue that this is a blatant attempt to stifle opposition and consolidate power, and some of them saw Saturday’s protest as a test run for the government’s strategy of suppressing future mobilizations. Days before the protest, authorities tried to restrict the march route, forcing organizers to end the demonstration a kilometer away from the G7 meeting site.
Despite these attempts, protesters refused to be stopped. They briefly broke through the set course of the rally, marching in areas originally declared off-limits by the authorities. In response, police deployed tear gas and used other forms of violence against them. Naples’ historic center has systematically been blocked off to popular protests, and things are set to get worse if the new bill is passed, protesters said. Because of that, community groups including Ex OPG – Je so’ pazzo called upon people to continue resisting.
“We believe this repressive project must be stopped, and more importantly, we see it as a reflection of the Meloni government’s fear of what might still be burning beneath the surface of the seeming calm in the country,” they said.
Saturday’s protest marked an important moment of resistance against the shrinking of democratic space in Italy, as well as to the strengthening of the armament agenda in Europe. Demonstrators announced they were ready to continue fighting against the security bill and expressed determination to challenge Meloni’s government over announced cuts to social support.
“Today, this square is sending a loud message: if the government thinks it can ignore social needs, public healthcare, workers’ rights, and housing in favor of pouring billions into military spending, it’s headed in the wrong direction,” said Chiara Capretti from Power to the People.
A proposed security bill in the Italian parliament aims to criminalize activism and penalize acts of solidarity
Giorgia Meloni’s government is on a rampage against popular dissent with a new bill under discussion in the Italian parliament. The proposed legislation seeks to penalize solidarity and criminalize activism, with the working class, migrants, and climate activists particularly at risk. In recent days, widespread protests have erupted, with trade unions, anti-fascist networks, and student groups all vowing to resist Meloni’s plans.
Giuliano Granato, a member of the left political party Power to the People (Potere al Popolo), criticized the bill’s framing as security legislation. He argued that it should instead be called the “Repression Bill” because “it responds to the country’s social needs only with more imprisonment and crime.”
“The government is saying that dissent and dispute are crimes in this country,” Granato added. “We believe they are the essence of democracy, and every achievement made over the decades is thanks to the struggles of the working classes.”
One of the bill’s most significant provisions is a crackdown on activists who block roads or railways during protests. Initially seen as targeting climate activists known for these tactics, the left has warned that it will also affect workers’ struggles. Granato pointed out that workers have also used such methods to protest, including during industrial action at Whirlpool factories over the last years.
Italy’s largest trade unions have echoed these concerns. The Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGIL) criticized the bill, arguing it represents an attack on trade union mobilizations aimed at protecting jobs and addressing company crises. In a joint statement with ANPI, the national anti-fascist network, the CGIL wrote: “The right wing continues to regard security only in terms of repression and punishment of social struggles.” Both organizations were at the forefront of protests held in several Italian cities on Wednesday, September 25.
The bill’s impact would extend beyond activists and workers, with prisoners facing harsh consequences. It proposes penalties for peaceful protests in prisons, such as sit-ins. Furthermore, limited protections currently granted to specific groups, like pregnant women or mothers of infants under one year of age, would be taken away. This would mean that babies would remain jailed with their mothers, despite only a handful of facilities being equipped to accommodate them. Legal and psychological experts have warned of the shocking impact this would have on children’s development even if capacities were expanded.
Migrants, the poor, and those showing solidarity with them are also at risk under the proposed law. Anti-eviction actions and those refusing to vacate spaces under threat of homelessness would be criminalized. Migrants without residence permits would be barred from legally obtaining SIM cards, their only connection to family and friends at home. Merchants who disobey this provision would face temporary closures.
While most describe the security bill as paving the way for a permanent police state, some groups might be looking forward to it. Approximately 300,000 police and security personnel would be granted the right to carry unofficial weapons in both private and public spaces – an idea that is likely to instill fear, rather than a sense of security, in the vast majority of the population.
Opposition to Meloni’s security bill is converging with ongoing resistance to her other policies, including the controversial differentiated autonomy reform. On Thursday, September 26, over 1 million signatures calling for a referendum against the reform were submitted by trade union and social movement leaders. These groups have vowed to remain in the streets, defending their right to protest and express dissent despite the government’s attempts to suppress them.
