WELDI baseline report

Lampedusa (IT)
6,500 inhabitants
Local coordinator: Consultant for the Municipality
Recuperating local agency and reconciling the island with migration
The island of Lampedusa embodies
the contradictions and failures of
EU migration policies like few other
places: in 2023 alone, the tiny Island
has been the “gate to Europe” for almost
150,000 migrants landing with
small boats from Tunisia and Libya.
While previously the local level was
involved in the reception, in the past
years this role has been monopolised
by the Italian state in the frame
of its “securisation” policy. The
state runs a hotspot on the Island
managed by the Red Cross, where
newcomers stay for a maximum
of three days after which they are
transferred to Sicily or the Italian
mainland. Although the municipality
and residents do not have any say on
what happens with newcomers, they
notice the impact of the arrivals in
terms of debris from boats blocking
the port infrastructure and scarce
emergency healthcare resources
becoming overstretched further.
The island also suffers from a reputation
of having become a place
of migrant deaths. In this situation,
Lampedusa wants to reclaim agency,
starting with improving services on
the island that help both arriving
migrants and the established population,
in partnership with the region
and the state.
Preliminary focus of the integrated action plan
▷ Protection of physical and
mental health of new arrivals
throughout their stay on the
island, while limiting their impact
of saturating healthcare services
for the local community.
▷ Actions aimed at ensuring the
centrality of the person in the
management of migrants’ postmortem
procedures as well as
the psychological and religious
support of their relatives.
▷ Find multi-level mechanisms
to make the phenomenon of
migration sustainable for the
small island of Lampedusa.
Partner profiles 33