The Price of Hope: Traffickers Profit as Asylum Seekers Head for Europe
By Walter Mayr
More than 150,000 refugees have landed this year on the Italian coastline,
most of them hoping to continue north. As the EU struggles to find an
answer, human traffickers are raking in billions.
* November 28, 2014 - 11:30 AM
Behind the La Grotta bar, Italy comes to an end. But a narrow road continues
onward across the border into France, hugging a cliff above the sea. It is a
bottleneck for illegal immigrants and traffickers.
Hidden behind agave bushes, three young men from Mali are crouching on the
steep slope, staring at the border. Just a few meters away, a group of
Syrian refugees are camped out in front of La Grotta, like pilgrims
searching for a hostel: men carrying backpacks, women wearing headscarves
and a little boy.
Ahmad, as he asked to be called, is the gray-bearded spokesman of the
illegal immigrants. Formerly a software developer in Damascus, he left his
wife and children behind. Ahmad pulls a crumpled piece of paper out of his
jacket pocket, the official certification of his arrival in Italy -- as
refugee number 13,962.
But this number is a reflection of statistics kept in merely one place --
the police headquarters in Crotone, located in southern Italy's Calabria
region. All in all, more than 150,000 migrants and refugees have landed on
Italy's shores nationwide since January and almost half of them -- more than
60,000 men, women and children -- were never registered in the European
Union's Eurodac database. They have long since disappeared, heading north
toward the rest of Europe......
Read it in PDF below:
Berhane
Received on Fri Nov 28 2014 - 17:23:42 EST