Italy to use its Forces to put a Halt to mass of Illegal Immigrants from Tunisia

Italy like many other EU countries or those countries that have joined the EU have had enough of mass Illegal immigration and immigration for benefits and no other reasons which has help in its recession and economic down fall, as like Ireland Greece, France, Germany, and England.

Italy’s interior minister said that the country hoped to send its armed forces to Tunisia to help stem the flow of illegal immigrants, after more than 3,000 Tunisians arrived by boat on an Italian island in recent days.

“I will ask Tunisia’s foreign minister for authorization for our forces to intervene in Tunisia to block the influx,” Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said in an Italian television interview, a day after the Italian cabinet declared a state of humanitarian emergency and called for help from the European Union which is the problem.

With thousands of miles of hard-to-patrol coastline, Italy faced waves of immigrants from North Africa throughout the 1990s and into the last decade. Under the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, in 2009, Italy signed a renewed bilateral accord with Tunisia, pledging financial support in exchange for help in preventing would-be immigrants from leaving the country’s shores.

But that accord seems to have unravelled in the turmoil in Tunisia’s interim government a month after President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was forced from power in a popular uprising.

Mr. Maroni, who did not specify which Italian forces might intervene in Tunisia, spoke before it emerged that Tunisia’s foreign minister, Ahmed Ounaïes, had stepped down on Sunday. But his comments pointed to growing concerns among Italians that the unrest in Tunisia and elsewhere in North Africa could translate into mass immigrants arriving on their shores. They also came at a delicate moment in Italian domestic politics.

Mr. Maroni is from the Northern League party, which is known for its tough anti-immigrant stance and which has been jockeying for a greater role in government now that Mr. Berlusconi is fighting for political survival in a sex scandal.

In a separate television interview, Mr. Maroni described the flow of immigrants as being “of biblical proportions,” the ANSA news agency reported.

In recent days, more than 3,000 plus Tunisians have come by boat to Lampedusa, a small Italian island closer to Tunisia than the Italian mainland, the Interior Ministry said. Hundreds have been sleeping outside because of a lack of facilities there.

On Sunday, the Interior Ministry reopened an immigrant holding centre on Lampedusa that had been closed in the past, and began airlifting some immigrants to identification centres in Sicily and the Italian mainland, Italian news outlets reported Sunday.

Speaking from behind a high fence at Lampedusa’s sports centre, where the mass of Illegal immigrants waited for the police to record their arrival, one young Tunisian told the London Times the situation at home had not changed, prompting him to leave Tunisia, (saying we want to get to England, we have been told we can have a house and we get paid money if we can get there)

“We don’t want to say here in Europe, not here in Italy, but in England somewhere,” he said in “We only want one thing from Italian people help to get to England.”