Seite - 66 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Band 2/2016

66 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 2 2o16 Tony Kushner | Lampedusa and the Migrant Crisis “Look at me out here cruising on my boat, at the same time people are out there dying. So our heaven is their hell, right? Our paradise is their hell.” 21 Of Italian immigrant origin, ‘Catrambone saw the migrants as either desperate, entrepreneu- rial, or both – not too different from his own great-grandfather’. To him, the moral imperative to help was unambiguous: “If you are against saving lives at sea then you are a bigot and you don’t even belong in our community. If you allow your neighbour to die in your backyard, then you are responsible for that death.” 22 Catrambone purchased a yacht, the Phoenix, sailed across the Atlantic and in ten weeks from August 2014 rescued over 1400 people in the Mediterranean. To him, as with those in Britain and elsewhere during the Nazi era, rather than wait for their governments and international organisations to act, they have shown that individuals can make a critical difference themselves. There are no definitive figures for those who have died migrating to Europe using the Mediterranean. Using media and NGOs, the monitoring group Fortress Europe argued that between 1993 and 2011, close to 20,000 died en route. Since then the numbers have gone up alarmingly – estimated at 3419 for 2014 and 300 higher for 2015 with the figure likely to be exceeded in 2016.23 The problem of using such information, however, is that ‘Some places receive more... attention than others because they have developed into “border theatres”’. Of all these, Lampedusa until 2014 was the most prominent example.24 Without its connection to boat migrants, ‘Lampedusa would be just one of the many minor Italian islands living on fishing and tourism’.25 Its recent connection to migration began slowly and then transformed the island. At times since the twenty first century, migrants have outnumbered residents (5,800) and an infrastructure involving large scale policing and humanitarian presence has also impac- ted on the everyday life of Lampedusa. It is often assumed that desperate migrants have wanted to come to Lampedusa as the closest piece of European land from Africa. Whilst in the early stages of this movement in the 1990s, there was an element of truth in such assumptions, it has not been the case subsequently. Since the early twenty first century, it has been emphasised that migrants ‘did not arrive of their own accord’: they thus did not choose Lampedusa, but were directed and diverted there by the Italian authorities as a way of controlling the flows of migration which were both increasing in numbers and diversifying in places of origin.26 21 Giles Tremlett, ‘“If you are against saving lives at sea then you are a bigot”’, Guardian, 8 July 2015. 22 Ibid. 23 Guardian, 2 April 2015; 10m Displacement Tracking Matrix. [2015]. Migration Flows Europe, http://migration. iom.int/europe, accessed 27 December 2015. 24 Tara Brian and Frank Laczko(eds), Fatal Journeys: Tracking Lives Lost during Migration (Geneva: International Organization for Migration, 2014), 93. 25 Paolo Cuttitta, ‘Borderizing the Island. Setting and Narratives of the Lampedusa “Border Play”’, ACME 13 (2) (2014), 214. 26 Dines et al, ‘Thinking Lampedusa’, 432-3.