Italian politician pledges to kick out half a million illegal migrants if elected prime minister

A Right-wing politician who hopes to be the next prime minister of Italy has pledged to expel half a million migrants if his party wins the coming election.

Matteo Salvini, the head of the Eurosceptic Northern League, said he aimed to repatriate 100,000 migrants in his first year in power, followed by another 400,000 during the rest of his five-year term in office.

“There are half a million irregular migrants in Italy. All of them need to be sent home,” Mr Salvini told La Repubblica newspaper.

The remarks came as the Catholic Church warned that political parties risked fomenting a “climate of fear” by campaigning on immigration issues.

The Northern League has struck up an alliance with Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and two smaller Right-wing parties.

As campaigning intensifies for the March 4 general election, the bloc is expected to win around 36 per cent of the national vote, putting it well ahead of the centre-Left and the anti-establishment Five Star Movement.

The key question is whether it will be Forza Italia or the Northern League which garners the most votes and is therefore able to choose who becomes prime minister.

Mr Berlusconi cannot put himself forward because of a ban on holding public office as a result of a tax fraud conviction and has not said who his candidate for premier would be.

Polls show that Forza Italy is likely to attract around 16 per cent of the vote against the League’s 14 per cent, but a spokeswoman for the League said surveys had often proved to be unreliable in the past and she believed grass-roots support for the party to be far stronger.

Mr Salvini dismissed suggestions that his party was xenophobic, arguing that he was trying to prevent the rise of racism by tackling the problem of illegal immigrants.

“The only antidote to racism is to control, regulate and limit immigration. There are millions of Italian in economic difficulty. Italians are not racist, but out-of-control immigration brings with it far from positive reactions. We want to prevent that,” he said.

Whether the League, even if it won power, would be able to expel so many migrants is open to question, given the legal and logistical difficulties that past governments have wrestled with.

It takes months to process an asylum application, and there is an appeals process which can prolong it further.

Migrants who have their applications turned down often simply walk out of reception facilities and disappear, begging on the streets or finding work in the black economy.

Even those identified for repatriation may not be sent home because their home countries are reluctant to take back their people.

All of which means that the pace of repatriations has been slow.

Immigration is emerging as one of the key issues in the election campaign. Last year, 120,000 migrants and refugees reached Italy from the coast of Libya, while in 2016 the total was 180,000.

So far this year 2,750 migrants have been rescued at sea, up from 2,400 in the same period last year.

Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti, the head of the Italian Bishops Conference, said parties risked encouraging xenophobia, “evoking debates on race that we thought we had buried for good.”

He pointed out that this month marks 80 years since Mussolini introduced discriminatory race laws which resulted in thousands of Italian Jews being rounded up and sent to Nazi death camps.

Last week a senior member of the Northern League warned that “the white race” in Italy was in danger of dying out because of uncontrolled migration.

“We have to decide if our ethnicity, if our white race, if our society continues to exist or if it will be canceled out,” said Attilio Fontana, who is the League’s candidate to become the next governor of Lombardy, the wealthy northern region that includes Milan.

For years the League campaigned for independence for the north of the country from the rest of the Italy, referring to the region as Padania.

It has since dropped that objective and is trying to reinvent itself as a party with national appeal, campaigning heavily in the south of Italy as well as its traditional heartland in the north.

“Italians are afraid,” a spokeswoman told journalists in Rome this week. “If you let migrants into the country indiscriminately, then they have nothing to do, they are just thrown into reception camps and they have to rob homes and people. Refugees who are fleeing wars have the right to stay but not economic migrants.”