Migrants, Meloni and Sanchez's similarities on 'regular' flows

Outsourcing is neither new to the EU nor exclusive to Meloni. EUR 1 billion was agreed, in a pact similar to the one reached in 2016, with Turkey, for EUR 6 billion, where in addition to the money it was approved that Turkish citizens could travel to Europe without a visa. The same had previously been done with Gaddafi's Libya, which in a summit in Tripoli had asked for EUR 4 billion to prevent Europe 'going black'. Tunisia alone accounted for about 100,000 of the more than 151,000 arrivals recorded in 2023, of which about 80,000 came from other African countries. The iron wrist exhibited by Saied seems to have favoured these results. 'I don't think governments want people to die, but they are willing to accept that people suffer and die in exchange for them not arriving,' says Gonzalo Fanjul, researcher and research director of the PorCausa organisation. In this sense, 'Spain is applying the same crackdown of externalising migration control that it has applied for years,' Fanjul continues.

Tunisia alone accounted for around 100,000 of the more than 151,000 landings recorded in 2023, with a share of around 80,000 incoming migrants from other African countries. The iron thumb exhibited by Saied, fortified with over a billion from the EU, seems to have favoured those results that do not materialise with the offensive against NGOs and the design of an outsourcing of the reception process.

The Meloni government's other battle concerns the rescue NGOs, which, according to Villa, 'have no evidence of contributing to the departures'. The inhibition of NGOs has been expressed in specific interventions, such as the so-called Piantedosi decree. The inhibition of NGOs has been expressed in specific interventions, such as the so-called Piantedosi decree: a text of law approved in January 2023 and 'containing urgent provisions for the management of migratory flows', an intervention that expresses itself on boats engaged in rescues off the Mediterranean coast.

The text obliges NGOs' vessels to "request, in the immediacy of the event, the assignment of the port of disembarkation" and to "reach the port of disembarkation indicated by the authorities without delay, in order to complete the rescue", coupled with a tried and tested practice: that of assigning particularly distant ports of call to the vessels in question, usually in northern Italy or on the Adriatic coast, with the result of prolonging the migrants' stay on board and thinning out the rescue activities of the organisations themselves. A practice with visible consequences for the NGOs "and above all for the rescued people, since more days of navigation than expected not only increase the costs of the missions and limit their possibilities of rescue, but also increase the suffering of already vulnerable people, delay access to services and the possibility of applying for international protection," explains Davide Giacomino of the advocacy office of Emergency, an Italian NGO founded in 1994 and also active in sea rescue activities.

Among the most recent cases are those of boats forced to dock in Genoa port after conducting a rescue in Libyan waters, as happened to the 'Geo Barents' of Médecins Sans Frontières in June 2024.

During his three-country tour, in which he spoke about quotas, worker training and 'circular immigration' and investment promotion, such as the 'Africa Advances Alliance', presented in Dakar, Sanchez defended expulsions. "It is also essential to repatriate those who arrived in Spain irregularly," said the Spanish president, on the third stop of his African tour, in Senegal. "Especially because this repatriation sends a clear, sharp and strong message that discourages the mafias and those who put themselves in their hands," he said.

Paradoxically, Sánchez's announcement that made the most noise during his tour of Africa, that of formalising a legal quota for emigration to Spain for work reasons, is very similar to Meloni's less publicised strategy of promoting legal immigration. Through the so-called 'flows decree' (27/09/2023), one of the most right-wing forces in Italy's recent history has literally opened the doors to the entry of 452,000 foreign citizens for 'reasons of seasonal and non-seasonal employment and self-employment', divided between 136,000 in 2023, 151,000 in 2024 and 165,000 in 2025.

Other EU governments, such as Romania, have also established work permit quotas for non-EU foreigners to cope with labour shortages, in their case exacerbated by the more than five million Romanians outside their country. In Romania, these workers come mainly from Nepal, Sri Lanka and India, with quotas of 100,000 permits in 2023 and 140,000 in 2024. Even in Poland, where many of the jobs occupied by Ukrainians have been affected by the war, work permits for Asians and Latin Americans have skyrocketed to 275,000 in 2023, mainly for citizens from India, Nepal and the Philippines.

'We must have the courage to accept that the approach taken so far is a failure,' Fanjul says. 'We need a solid alternative in terms of legal and safe channels that responds both to the need for emigration from sub-Saharan African countries and to the need for immigration that we European countries have in the face of demographic winter,' he concludes.

*This article is part of the Pulse project and was written by Alberto Magnani (Il Sole 24 Ore, Italy), Lola García-Ajofrín (El Confidencial, Spain).