LAMPEDUSA, Italy — The scene repeats itself in the warm seasons, almost every day. Always the same. Coast guard ships glide into Lampedusa’s tiny port and moor at the small Favarolo pier. People rescued at sea are brought ashore, led down the gangway, quickly transferred to the reception center.
For anyone not directly involved in the mechanisms of rescue and reception, nothing in the activity around the harbor betrays what happens. Even when those arriving still carry in their eyes the raw memory of tragedy and loss, little seems to change around them.
Even when, as has happened repeatedly this October, it is the bodies of those who did not make it that are brought ashore. What stands out are only those fleeting appearances, people arriving from far away, out of place, out of time. Then, as suddenly as they appeared, they vanish.
Since the pandemic, the informal arrangement that once let migrants step outside the reception center on Italy's southernmost island is suspended. Their presence will not trouble the tourists — tanning, swimming, sipping spritzes on this sun-bleached rock in the middle of the Mediterranean.
Held under administrative detention, migrants are prisoners in all but name. Within days they will be on another ship bound for Sicily, from there scattered across Italy’s web of reception facilities. Others will soon take their place. Today, the reception system on the island — run by Italian and European authorities with the Italian Red Cross — is a well-oiled machine, with transfers to Sicily becoming considerably faster.
Rescues, landings, and transfers happen quietly, almost invisibly, without the holidaymakers on the beaches even noticing.
On Ferragosto, Italy’s midsummer holiday, tourists celebrated unaware while, in the island’s cemetery, coffins of 23 migrants who drowned just days earlier lay directly on the ground, waiting to be moved to Sicily for burial. News of the shipwreck barely flickered across national media before sinking into silence.
What remains to testify to the darkness behind this routine are the boats themselves, intercepted by the coast guard and left in the harbor. Some 30 feet long. Open to the elements. Some wooden, others fiberglass.
These are the vessels, overcrowded with men, women, sometimes children, that cross the vastness of the central Mediterranean — craft utterly unfit for such a voyage. Traces of the crossing still cling to them: a half-eaten packet of biscuits, a blanket, a child’s toy. They sit only steps from where tourist boats depart for island tours, but unless you’re looking, you don’t see them.
For more than 30 years, Lampedusa has been the island of irregular migration, a place that lives however unwillingly, with many ghosts. Foremost among them are those who never made it to shore alive.
According to the International Organization for Migration, some 25,470 people have perished in the central Mediterranean since 2014, including 885 since the start of this year alone.
Partial as they are, these figures are already terrifying. But they mean little unless one tries to imagine what a single human life contains: its relationships, its affections, its story.
That is not easy while contempt for migrants remains a winning card for politicians across the world, from the United States to Europe to India. In the absence of reflection, and amid a relentless discourse of dehumanization, the numbers mean nothing. Even if they flash briefly on the evening news, they are not treated as measures of loss or consequence.
Europe's choice is Lampedusa's unwilling fate
A visit to Lampedusa’s cemetery, just a few steps from the sea, can be an attempt to give substance to those numbers. Among its narrow alleys, between the tombs of Lampedusans, the visitor notices other graves, different ones, painted in bright colors, decorated with ceramic tiles.
Thousands have died in the waters around Lampedusa. Only a few found their final rest here, in this small cemetery. Some have been identified; others bear just a brief note on the shipwreck that brought them here.
Small traces that might one day help those on the other side of the sea searching for a son, a daughter, a friend who never returned. One grave reads: “29 September 2000. Unidentified migrant. Here rests.” A concise reminder, for anyone willing to see, that the tragedy of death at sea in the central Mediterranean is nothing new.
Vincenzo, the cemetery’s retired caretaker, remembers the first time, in April 1996, when he had to bury 16 migrants who drowned. He was alone. He recalls their bodies: swollen, pale, almost white. Over the years, he says, the people he buried often return to him in his dreams.
However, there is another ghost haunting the island: the specter of European migration policy. In the early 1990s, as the European Union took shape, it also began to build mechanisms to regulate its external borders. It introduced a common visa regime for citizens of Asian, North African and sub-Saharan countries, linking the right to a visa to proof of financial means benchmarked against the average incomes of European countries.
In doing so, the E.U. effectively excluded vast populations from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia not only from the possibility of migrating to Europe, but even from visiting it. This is where Europe’s migration crisis truly began: not with a sudden surge in arrivals, or with a humanitarian emergency, but with a political choice — the decision to block movement from the poorer, non-white parts of the world.
That political decision — unseen, unspoken, and never reversed — is the other heavy shadow that permeates life on Lampedusa. The imposition of visa regimes in the early 1990s created a tangled web of irregular migration routes to reach Europe from its southern flanks, the deadliest of which leads to this small island.
In the three decades since, Europe’s leadership has changed many times. But no one has ever questioned this machinery of death that Lampedusa knows so well. In a continent consumed by debate over migration, almost no one remembers those old rules, the ones that still prevent a large share of humanity from traveling to Europe at all. The political conversation now revolves around anxieties of identity: religious, racial, linguistic.
Across the continent, far-right parties — from Italy’s Fratelli d’Italia to Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland and France’s Rassemblement National — have gained strength by promising to defend a white, Christian Europe and to reinforce its borders.
They do not know or perhaps they pretend not to that Europe’s doors have been closed for 35 years. Long before Giorgia Meloni, Marine Le Pen, or Alice Weidel came along, Europe already made itself unreachable.
Anyone spreading or embracing the rhetoric of further closure need only come to Lampedusa to see: the road to Europe has long been sealed. And many of those who try to reach it, even just to glimpse it, must accept the risk of dying — and joining the island’s ranks of ghosts.
