Post by lavendersblue on Aug 24, 2014 8:52:31 GMT
Inside the migrant camps where hundreds of illegal immigrants take first steps on European soil
Aug 23, 2014 22:45
By Nick Dorman
Seven hundred people clutching everything they own in bags and shopping trollies are getting closer to their dream of a new life – many hoping it will be in Britain
Foothold: Immigrants arrive at Port Augusta in Sicily
With the temperature nudging 90F, a long snaking line of illegal immigrants take their first steps on European soil.
Seven hundred people clutching everything they own in bags and shopping trollies are getting closer to their dream of a new life – with many hoping it will be in Britain, reports the Sunday People.
This was the scene last week when the Sunday People visited a refugee centre in Augusta on the eastern coast of the Italian island of Sicily.
Charity workers handed out bottled water to the latest consignment of desperate migrants from Africa who have paid traffickers thousands of pounds for a perilous voyage across the Mediterranean.
They are the lucky ones – around 150 were feared drowned when a crammed wooden boat heading for Italy sank off Libya.
Libyan coastguard vessels rescued only 17 out of an estimated 170 Africans.
Matt Sprake migrants
Camp: The set up at the Stadio Conca d'Oro Baseball in Messina
The Augusta centre is among a string of similar sites set up by authorities across Sicily and mainland Italy.
Some 140,000 illegal migrants have entered Europe via Italy since January – more than last year’s entire total – and investigators reckon one in five want to reach Britain.
Most are free to leave the camps after asylum claims are processed.
Under the Schengen Agreement which allows borderless travel in the EU apart from Britain and Ireland, some board trains north through Italy and France, eventually reaching Calais.
From there, Dover and the rest of Britain is just a tantalising 26 miles away if they can stow away in a lorry.
And they are not deterred by fatalities – like last week’s when an Afghan was found dead and 34 others badly dehydrated in a shipping container brought to Tilbury, Essex, from Zeebrugge, Belgium.
Immigrants arrive at Port Augusta in Sicily Hope: Some 140,000 illegal migrants have entered Europe via Italy since January
When we visited the Augusta centre on Friday, 700 migrants had just arrived after being rescued by the Italian navy from three traffickers’ vessels.
Children were being washed with bottled mineral water while queues snaked around three portable toilets serving the site.
Babies cried as families waited to be dished out milk and biscuits.
After a few days they will be moved to a tented town in an old baseball stadium guarded by police in the north Sicilian port Messina.
One 33-year-old man from Eritrea who has been there for six weeks told us: “Life is good.
"We get fed every day and when we go into the town no one bothers us.
“But I would like to go north soon. To England? Maybe, who knows?”
www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/inside-migrant-camps-hundreds-illegal-4097830#ixzz3BIWOE8ns
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