Lucas: Migrant crisis a worldwide shocker

Donald Trump is not the only political leader who wants to seal the border.

European leaders, who once ridiculed Trump on the issue of illegal immigration, are now falling over each other to do what he did.

Half of the European Union country members, led by Denmark, have called for a plan to outsource the arrival of immigrants seeking asylum to neighboring countries.

And they are using tiny Albania, Italy’s little neighbor across the Adriatic Sea, as an example of how to do it.

The Europeans, beginning with Italy, are turning Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy which worked — until President Joe Biden killed it — into “Remain in Albania.”

The Trump policy kept migrants seeking asylum in Mexico where they could be vetted before being allowed into the U.S., if they were allowed in at all.

Italy will do the same thing, only in Albania.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, said the EU could “draw lessons” from Italy’s detention and processing center in Albania. The commission is the executive arm of the EU.

The flood of immigrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa do not compare to the millions of illegal immigrants who have invaded the U.S. under Joe Biden.

Still, more than a million migrants have reached Italy by boat from North Africa in the past decade, the vast majority of whom quickly leave reception centers and head to northern Europe.

Under a closely watched deal worked out by diminutive, right-wing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, (5’4”), and Socialist giant Edi Rama (6’7”) the Albanian prime minister, migrants picked up at sea will be sent to camps in Albania, a non-European Union member, and not Italy, which is.

While the towering left-wing Rama appears able to slip the smaller right-wing Meloni into his pocket along with his car keys, it is Meloni who has Rama in her pocket.

To that end Meloni’s government has spent millions of euros constructing and staffing a bleak, fenced-in, steel and concrete migrant camp by the remote and nearly empty village of Gjader in northwestern Albania.

I can attest to its remoteness as I have been there as well as throughout the region.

The camp resembles a modern version of the concentration camps that the late Communist dictator Enver Hoxha set up to punish dissidents when the Communists ruled the country.

It is a far cry from the neighboring region of Lezhe, where Italian Count Galeazzo Ciano, Benito Mussolini‘s playboy foreign minister and son-in-law, used to spend weekends at his hunting lodge with his mistresses.

But it shows that Italy for years has had a strong presence in Albania, both before and after World War II, interrupted only by the Communist takeover which ran from 1944 to 1990.

Rama is said to have supported the plan in exchange for Italy’s backing of Albania’s application to join the EU, as well as an economic boost to the poverty-stricken area.

And with political corruption among politicians a way of life in Albania, who knows what else is going on?

The idea of the detention facility is to keep the migrants away from Italy, except for women with children, until they can be vetted as legitimate asylum seekers and not drug and human traffickers or other criminals.

Under the deal, which is praised by EU members, some 3,000 migrants a month heading for Italy, but rescued by the Italian navy in international waters, will be shipped to Albania, not Italy, where they will be screened.

Theoretically, those who qualify for asylum will be transferred to Italy while those who do not will be sent back to the countries they came from.

Meloni, sounding like Trump, called her approach “a new, courageous, unprecedented path.” Everyone may not agree.

Hardly had the first batch of 16 of migrants from Bangladesh and Egypt been dropped off last week, however, then an Italian court said the practice was illegal.

Undeterred, Meloni’s right-wing government approved a decree bypassing the court.

Like it or not, at least this Italian border czar is doing something.

Peter Lucas is a veteran political reporter and author of “The OSS in World War II Albania.”  Email him at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com