Macron still challenges Italy: a truck full of migrants sends us back

THE illegal, the gendarmerie pinched them a few kilometers from Nice. They were all thirty-one crammed into a truck that was traveling on a highway in south-eastern France. After being stopped during a routine check, the Pakistanis were taken to our country while the driver was arrested and taken to Menton. An action that, despite following the non-admission procedures that came into force in 2015 after the closure of the crossings with Italy, has unleashed the wrath of the League. "Other than Orban, the Macron European is ruthless", he complained Matteo Salvini accusing the Conte government of being "partner in crime" of the French or "unable" to manage the immigration emergency.

Since 2015, with the excuse of the terrorism emergency, the French government has suspended the Schengen agreements and began to patrol all borders and crossings with Italy. As already documented last summer in a reportage of the Giornale.it, the two-year limit imposed by the treaties has been largely circumvented. And so not a day goes by without the gendarmerie knocking out trains from Italy in search of illegal immigrants or the motorways of the south of the country to stop the passeurs. And so, once the migrants are pinched without a residence permit, they are immediately loaded onto a van, transferred to the border and handed over to the Italian authorities to be repatriated (watch the video). This also happened yesterday, as announced by the Nice prosecutor, when during a check on a motorway in the south-east of France, a few kilometers from the Italian border, thirty-one Pakistanis were found inside a truck.
"Among the occupants of the truck – said the Nice prosecutor – there were three teenagers around 15 years old but without a family". Without thinking too much, the French handed over the thirty-one Pakistanis to the Italian authorities. "We have acted on the basis of the non-admission procedure in force since the restoration of control of border in November 2015 ", said the French prefecture, recalling that this type of procedure applies when the control takes place in one of the so-called "authorized passes". A sort of virtual frontier that allows agents to stop all irregular immigrants, regardless of age. Too bad that, as the vice president of the Senate, Roberto Calderoli, reminds us, the decision to suspend the Schengen agreements and to restore border controls was unilateral. "This is the Europe to which we are bowing – the League thunders – we are treated as a banana republic and treat us as if we were a center for the gathering of illegal immigrants".

Now the Nice prosecutor's office promises to get to work to track down the network of traffickers which allowed the thirty-one Pakistanis to reach a few kilometers from Nice. The reality, however, is that their only purpose is to reject as many foreigners as possible. So much so that the same prefecture of the Maritime Alps has claimed "the effectiveness of measures to combat illegal immigration, which operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week", to send the illegal immigrants back to Italy. Even those that, as demonstrated by Giornale.it, they are caught hundreds of kilometers from the Italian border (watch the video). And the tricks used by the gendarmerie, on the imposition of the French government, are manifold. These include the falsification of documents. And yet, despite the constant complaints, the European Union, which has spent so much time on Italy's closed ports and Hungary's rejections, has never moved a finger to counter the hard fist of Emmanuel Macron.