Page - 67 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Tony Kushner | Lampedusa and the Migrant Crisis 67 In 2013, close to 15,000 migrants were processed through Lampedusa, most fleeing from Eritrea.27 The numbers in the early 1990s were much smaller, but in 1996 they merited the con- struction of an informal reception centre, largely run by local volunteers trained by the Italian Red Cross.28 Two years later, reflecting the growing anxiety about such migration, this volun- tary centre was replaced by an official one near the airport. It accommodated up to 150 people and was surrounded by barbed wire: ‘inmates were forbidden from moving freely around the island. After a period (during which they were given almost no information about asylum pro- cedures) boatpeople were “distributed” by plane to other facilities in Sicily or mainland Italy or deported to Libya.’ In turn, a new detention (rather than reception) centre was construc- ted which opened in 2007, designed for a up to 800 internees and largely invisible within Lampedusa town, the only settlement beyond a few scattered houses on the island.29 Lampedusa had become a ‘border zone’,30 a place which had ‘essentially become deta- ched from the rest of Italy’.31 It is, in the words of Alison Mountz, one of many ‘sta- teless spaces’.32 The Sicilian Channel had, in effect, ‘become an outer border of the Euro- pean Union’,33 and Lampedusa was the focal place/non-place where attempts were made at controlling the flow of unwanted ‘illegal’ migrants. Then on 3 October 2013, ‘the world witnessed the most dramatic human disaster in the Mediterranean Sea since the Second World War’.34 A small fishing boat left Libya carrying over 500 largely Somalian and Eri- trean refugees. The vessel caught fire just half a mile from Lampedusa – only 155 survived with the rest drowning. What happened on 3 October 2013 was far from the first instance of 27 Zed Nelson, ‘A long way home’, Guardian, 22 March 2014. 28 Heidrun Friese, ‘Border Economies: A Nascent Migration Industry Around Lampedusa’, in Borders, Mobilities and Migrations: Perspectives from the Mediterranean 19-21st Century edited by Lisa Anteby-Yemini et al (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2014), 121. 29 Ibid, 122; author site visit, 6 August 2015. It is above the town and accessible only through a dead end road. 30 Cuttitta, ‘“Borderizing” the Island’, 205. 31 Dines et al, ‘Thinking Lampedusa’, 433. 32 Alison Mountz, Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010) 129. 33 Timothy Raeymaekers, ‘Introduction: Europe’s Bleeding Border and the Mediterranean as a Relational pace’, ACME 13 (2)(2014), 165. 34 Ibid. Fig. 4: Mural, Lampedusa Town, Photo: Tony Kushner