After just six months in charge of Italy’s Interior Ministry, the country’s populist deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini has driven migrant deportations up 28 percent, new figures show.
The number of illegal migrants who were put on aeroplanes and sent home stood at 2,833 between January 1st and May 31st this year prior to Salvini’s entering the Viminale. Since then, it has risen to 3,626 for the period between June 1st and December 9th.
After sending sea arrival numbers down by 65 per cent compared to the previous year with his tough stance on NGO boats ferrying migrants across the Mediterranean Sea, the League (Lega) leader promised in September that upping deportation numbers was next on the government’s to-do list.
Hailing the interior ministry figures, Salvini told a press conference his “aim is to ensure that immigration to Italy is regular and regulated”, adding that migrant drowning deaths in Italian waters have plummeted from 216 in 2017 to just 23 this year due to the decline in attempted crossings.
On Monday, local media reported that authorities in Turin have begun evicting squatters from the city’s former Olympic Village, which had been illegally occupied by a figure of around 1,000 predominantly sub-Saharan African individuals, according to estimates earlier this year.
League politicians had long sounded the alarm on the situation at the site, which has acted as a migrant hub for several years, with MEP Mario Borghezio demanding its clearance in 2016 after it emerged that three African men from the site had kidnapped, held for 30 hours, and repeatedly raped a girl with mental disabilities.
Breitbart London previously reported how occupants of the former Olympic Village terrorised locals when they took to the streets to protest against “racist” Italian taxpayers’ failure to provide illegal immigrants with a “decent life”.
The riots in question saw around 300 migrants head into Turin to block traffic, overturn garbage bins, and hurl projectiles and threats at passers-by, with one protester hailing the Bataclan massacre in France in which 89 people were brutally murdered by Islamists as the “revenge of the excluded”.