Albania Approves Migrant Center Deal With Italy

Facts

• Albania's Parliament voted 77-0 Thursday to approve a five-year deal with Italy to hold migrants while their asylum requests are being processed. Members of the conservative opposition party sat out of the vote in protest.¹
• Under the deal, which was signed by Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in November, Italy will pay Albania 600M euros ($650M) to build two processing centers that will hold up to 3K migrants at any given time.²
• The agreement places Italy fully in charge of operating the facilities and legally responsible for the migrants throughout the asylum process. Italy would also take migrants in if their requests were granted.³
• Albania is expected to house upwards of 36K asylum seekers per year under the agreement. For those whose asylum requests are denied, Italy will also be in charge of facilitating their deportations from Albania.⁴
• Rama's Socialist party was previously blocked from holding the vote by the conservatives, 30 of whom filed an unsuccessful attempt to block the deal with the Constitutional Court. Italy's lower and upper chambers of Parliament approved the bill in January and this month.¹
• This comes as migrant arrivals in Italy jumped from 103,850 in 2022 to 155,750 last year — a 50% increase. Among last year's arrivals were over 17K unaccompanied minors.²

Sources: ¹ABC News, ²FOX News, ³TheJournal.ie and ⁴Al Jazeera.

Narratives

• Left narrative, as provided by Amnesty International. This agreement flies in the face of both the international and European laws Italy is supposed to follow. Countries are required to immediately take in and process refugees on the land they arrived, but Italy is now going to send these vulnerable asylum seekers — who already trekked across the ocean to reach Italy — hundreds of miles away to a different country where they could then be deported.
• Right narrative, as provided by European Conservative. Under the current system propped up by the mass migration nonprofit industry, Italy has received over a million migrants in the past ten years. The reason Italy needed this deal is because as these large waves of migrants come ashore, they eventually disappear into the country after checking into a processing center. Italy deserves to control who they accept and reject, which is why Albania is lending a hand.