U.K. meets with Italy over immigration policy in Rome

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, left, in a purple suit, shakes hands with Keir Starmer in a black suit.

By Jill Lawless and Nicole Winfield

Sept. 16, 2024 7:56 AM PT

ROME — U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer met Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni in Rome on Monday, as the center-left British leader aimed to learn how her right-wing government has achieved “dramatic declines” in the number of migrants reaching Italy’s shores by boat.

The visit comes after at least eight seaborne migrants died off the French coast over the weekend trying to cross the English Channel.

The Labour Party prime minister isn’t a natural ally of Meloni, who heads the far-right Brothers of Italy party. But migration has climbed the U.K. political agenda, and Starmer hopes Italy’s tough approach can help him stop people fleeing war and poverty trying to cross the channel in flimsy, overcrowded boats.

More than 22,000 migrants have made the perilous crossing from France so far this year, a slight increase from the same period in 2023.

Several dozen people have perished in their attempts, including the eight killed when a boat carrying some 60 people ran aground on rocks late Saturday. The same day, 14 boats carrying 801 migrants reached Britain.

The number of migrants arriving in Italy by boat in the first half of this year was down 60% from 2023, according to the country’s Interior Ministry, and migration formed the core of the leaders’ talks at the Villa Doria Pamphilj, a 17th century mansion set in a large park not far from the Vatican.

At a joint news conference, Starmer said Italy had made “remarkable progress” by cracking down on smuggling gangs and “working with countries along migration routes as equals.”

Earlier he told reporters that Italy’s “dramatic reductions” were “down to the upstream work that’s been done in some of the countries where people are coming from.” He said, “prevention and stopping people traveling in the first place is one of the best ways to deal with this particular issue.”

Meloni pledged a crackdown on migration after taking office in 2022, aiming to deter would-be refugees from paying smugglers to make the dangerous Mediterranean crossing to Italy. Her nationalist conservative government has signed deals with individual African countries including Tunisia to block departures, imposed limits on the work of humanitarian rescue ships, cracked down on traffickers and taken measures to deter people from setting off.

Italy also has signed a deal with Albania under which some adult male migrants rescued at sea while trying to reach Italy would be taken instead to Albania while their asylum claims are processed.

Meloni said Starmer had expressed interest in “new solutions” such as the Albania deal, and said she had filled him in. She said the processing centers in Albania, which had been due to open in August, would likely be up and running in a few weeks and that it was best to delay the opening until they were ready since the “eyes of the world” would be on them.

Starmer confirmed the two leaders had discussed the Albania model, but stressed that “we don’t know the outcome of it.”

Starmer wants to learn from Italy’s mix of tough enforcement and international cooperation, though Italy’s approach has been criticized by refugee groups and others alarmed by Europe’s increasingly strict asylum rules, growing xenophobia and hostile treatment of migrants.

The leader of Italy’s right-wing League, Matteo Salvini, who is deputy prime minister in Meloni’s government, has been accused by prosecutors of alleged kidnapping for his decision to prevent a rescue ship carrying more than 100 migrants from landing in Italy when he was interior minister in 2019.

Meloni dismissed as “completely groundless” allegations that Italian plans like the Albania agreement risked violating migrants’ rights, saying they were covered by Italian legislation.

British Home Secretary Yvette Cooper defended the government’s decision to seek advice from Italy’s right-wing administration, saying, “we’ve always had a history of working with governments that have different political parties that are not aligned.”

“I don’t think it’s immoral to go after the criminal gangs,” Cooper told the BBC. “Quite the opposite. I think it’s actually a moral imperative to make sure that we are pursuing the criminal gangs who are putting lives at risk.”

Starmer toured Italy’s National Coordination Center for Immigration in Rome with newly appointed U.K. Border Security Commander Martin Hewitt. The government says Hewitt, a former head of Britain’s National Police Chiefs’ Council, will work with law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the U.K. and across Europe to tackle people-smuggling networks.

Ahead of the trip, Starmer said there would be “no more gimmicks,” he said before his trip to Rome — a reference to the previous Conservative government’s scuttled plan to send some asylum-seekers on a one-way trip to Rwanda, with no chance of returning to the U.K. even if their refugee claims were successful.

Starmer scrapped that plan soon after being elected in July.

The Conservatives said the deportation plan would act as a deterrent, but refugee and human rights groups called it unethical, judges ruled it illegal and Starmer dismissed it as an expensive gimmick.

Support for Ukraine was also on the agenda for the trip, part of Starmer’s effort to reset relations with European neighbors after Britain’s acrimonious 2020 departure from the European Union.

Unlike some politicians on the European right, Meloni is a staunch supporter of Ukraine. Starmer met her after returning from Washington, where he and U.S. President Biden discussed Ukraine’s plea to use Western-supplied missiles to strike targets deep inside Russia.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been pressing allies to allow his forces to use Western weapons to target air bases and launch sites inside Russia as Moscow steps up assaults on Ukraine’s electricity grid and utilities before winter. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that would mean NATO countries “are at war with Russia.”

So far, the U.S. hasn’t announced a change to its policy of allowing Kyiv to use American-provided weapons only in a limited area inside Russia’s border with Ukraine.

Meloni restated that Italian law precludes such use of Italian weaponry for offensive attacks against Russia. She said Italy’s main contribution had been and would continue to be in the area of defending Ukrainian civilians with anti-air defense systems, even when Moscow’s forces had “bombed cancer hospitals without pity.”

Lawless and Winfield write for the Associated Press.