Under Italy’s conservative Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the nation’s level of illegal immigration has plunged 64% after she cracked down hard on smugglers and worked with Italy’s neighbors to stop the flow, the country’s foreign minister boasted.
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said Sunday that her success shows that enforcing tough border policies is possible — it just takes hard work.
“It’s not easy. We’ve worked hard to achieve this goal,” Tajani told Maria Bartiromo on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.” “We are very happy for this. We are not against legal immigration, rather against illegal immigration.”
“We are working with an agreement with Tunisia, with Egypt, with Libya. We are working with the North African countries for reducing the boats coming …[and] fighting against the crime.”
Meloni’s policies had drawn mixed reactions in Europe, though newly minted UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer, a member of the left-leaning Labor Party, praised Italy’s policies on that front.
Tajani stressed that Italy is aggressively working to clamp down on human trafficking as smugglers get paid to move desperate migrants across borders.
“Human traffickers are the most important part of crime. They are human traffickers, weapon traffickers, drug traffickers. They [belong to] the same organization, but we need to be very strong and to fight against these organizations, and we are doing it,” Takani said.
Meloni had reflected on the human trafficking crisis during an interview with Bartiromo last year.
“We have to fight the traffickers,” Meloni emphasized in that interview. “What the traffickers are doing is incredible. These organizations are always becoming more powerful, and they use their power and the money they [have] against the state.”
“We cannot allow a mafia to decide who’s coming into our countries.”
Tajani, who is in the US ahead of the United Nations General Assembly’s session in Manhattan this week, mused that conservatives are on the rise in Europe.
“There is a majority center-right in Europe, also inside the new European Commission,” he said, referring to recent elections. “We are working hard for growth.”
Meloni is generally seen as one of the most popular national leaders in Europe, according to polls, and she has sometimes clashed with some of her more liberal counterparts.
Tajani contended that the current Italian government has made some strides on the economy, which has been fairly stagnant over the past two decades.
“We are happy because [there is] less unemployment. The stock exchange is going up,” he said, while caveating, “we need to do more.”
Broadly, Europe has grappled with sluggish growth. Earlier this month, former European Central Bank chief and Italian prime minister Mario Draghi unveiled a hotly anticipated 400-page report on how the 27-member bloc can rev up its economy once again.
Draghi used the report to investigate why Europe has grown slower than the US over recent years and seemingly fallen behind in key industries such as tech.
He called for regulatory reforms, a streamline of the bureacracy and more.
