Minister Lollobrigida: “Ready to let almost 500,000 immigrants enter Italy”. Then the reverse: “There is no plan”

“This year we will work to bring in almost 500,000 immigrants legally”. A few days after the shipwreck of Cutro, after the controversy over the minister’s sentences Plantednow to discuss are those of the Minister of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty Francesco Lollobrigida. Speaking of the need to govern migratory flows, the premier’s brother-in-law from Brussels guaranteed an increase never seen before in the flows of legal migrants. A number which, he continues, “can also be organized through multilateral and bilateral agreements to support legal immigration”. An expression that Lollobrigida was forced to correct shortly after having pronounced it.

The migratory flows

Lollobrigida explained that “working on flows is the right way, Italy has a flow plan that hasn’t been followed for years which can be an opportunity for those who want to come to Italy legally and safely”. For the minister “the more departures correspond to the more deaths, this is the absolute figure. Italy has done everything it could do, and the numbers show it. We have welcomed more migrants than any other – he continued – but now it is necessary to ask ourselves the problem at European level. It is not possible for a single nation to take charge of the problem”. And he added: “Illegal immigration is the enemy of legal immigration, we are not against migration we are against illegality”.

The minister’s turnaround

A couple of hours after his first statements, Lollobrigida backtracks: “I’m reading some press reports according to which I have announced a government plan to bring about 500,000 regular migrants to Italy,” he says. And he states: “In reality, I have never spoken of any plan, because there is no plan in this regard. The figure indicated by me and reported by the media refers to the number of requests for entry into our territory in the production, transport, in agriculture, in the tertiary sector and so on”.

Therefore, the FdI minister clarifies, “we have therefore not added anything to what has already been known for months, in an Italian context in which there are job offers in strategic sectors also put in crisis by measures such as the basic income. We underlined that the fight against irregular immigration is even more necessary precisely because it is an enemy of regular immigration”.