Europe’s biggest migrant reception centre in Italy’s Sicily closes officially
Italy’s Interior Minister and deputy PM Matteo Salvini addresses the media by a pile of garbage as he tours the centre on July 9, 2019 during the closure of Europe's one-time biggest asylum seeker and migrants reception centre in Mineo, southern Sicily.
This reception centre, a former housing complex for the US military that resembles an American suburb, is now guarded by Italian troops who block access under a roasting Sicilian sun.Its population then steadily dropped. When anti-migrant Salvini and the populist Five Star Movement came to power in June last year, it housed 2,500.
"If you look at how the centre was in the end, it's a good thing that it closed. But if you think what it could have been, it's a pity," he said.Local resident Sergio Mastrilli was more critical, as he drank a beer on a Mineo bar terrace."It wasn't a reception centre built on integration but on numbers."
He called for a Europe-wide solution to migration, and suggested "many migrants would like to stay in their own countries," if they could. The migrants were notably prepared to work for 10 or 20 euros a day during the orange harvest, angering locals who could not work for so little.But the centre also employed 400 people in the area, and Mineo's current mayor, Giuseppe Mistretta, has threatened to resign if the state doesn't help with the post-migrant transition.
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