
The village of Sutera in Sicily. Photo: Time
How One Sicilian Village Learned to Love Migrants
The Sicilian village of Sutera, like many in rural Italy, was dying. Its population fell from 5,000 in 1970 to 1,500 and there was little hope of revival. Its schools and businesses were closing and farmers struggled to tend its fields of pistacchio and olives, writes Lorenzo Tondo in Time.
This year, its population has surged by 200 after the local mayor agreed to take in some of the thousands of migrants that have made the dangerous journey from Africa to Sicily.
“We have always been a hospitable town,” says the Mayor of Sutera, Giuseppe Grizzanti. “Our name comes from the ancient Greek word Soter which means ‘salvation’ because, thanks to our geographical location, Sutera was a perfect stronghold against invasions. Two thousand years later, our town has rediscovered its vocation for hospitality, giving shelter to these families fleeing war.”
Sutera has more to offer than hospitality. Hundreds of its homes were empty and and it even had work to offer. “Sutera was disappearing,” says Grizzanti. “Italians, bound for Germany or England, packed up and left their homes empty. The deaths of inhabitants greatly outnumbered births. Now, thanks to the refugees, we have a chance to revive the city.”
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Migrants and refugees struggle ashore on a Greek beach. Photo: F. Malavolta, 2016.
Europe’s Refugee Story Has Hardly Begun
With a million new refugees expected in Europe this year, Greece faces a diplomatic onslaught and an existential crisis, writes Paul Mason of Channel Four News in an opinion piece in The Guardian.
The refugee story has hardly begun. There will be, on conservative estimates, another million arriving via Turkey this year – and maybe more. The distribution quotas proposed by Germany, and resisted by many states in eastern Europe, are already a fiction and will fade into insignificance as the next wave comes.
Germany itself will face critical choices: if you’re suddenly running a budget deficit to meet the needs of asylum seekers, how do you justify not spending on the infrastructure that’s supposed to serve German citizens, which has crumbled through underinvestment in the Angela Merkel era?
But these problems are sideshows compared with the big, existential issues that a second summer of uncontrolled migration into Greece would bring.
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