Italy Deports 1500 Migrants, Bulldozes Refugee Camp
Italian nationalist-populist leader Matteo Salvini has removed hundreds of refugees
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Italy’s populist leader, Matteo Salvini, has recently continued his hardline approach to unwanted migrants in his country by deporting over 1,500 from a refugee camp in Reggio before bulldozing the site.
Earlier in the week, Italian police removed around 1,592 migrants from the camp before flattening the shanty town where they were living.
The refugees who occupied the camp have continually evoked the ire of Italian citizens across the nation.
The government eventually intervened following a series of recent incidents, including three deaths.
“They preferred to stay in the shanty towns, just abuse, and illegality,” Minister of the Interior Salvini said, explaining that the government had attempted to offer other housing to the migrants, which was refused.
Nationalist Salvini said the elimination of the migrant camp “finally erased one of the most shameful slums in Italy, where degradation, lawlessness, and exploitation proliferated.”
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According to Breitbart, approximately 1,592 migrants have been removed from a shanty town migrant camp in southern Italy as part of the populist government’s policy to dismantle squatter camps across the country.
The shanty town, formerly located in the southern Italian city of Reggio in Calabria, was bulldozed this week by police following a series of problems stemming from the makeshift camp in recent months, Italian newspaper Il Giornale reports.
Safety concerns at the camp have been a major issue, with fires breaking out over the last few months that have led to three deaths.
The most recent being a 29-year-old Senegalese man who died last month.
In the aftermath of the death of the Senegalese man, populist Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini said the government had offered up 133 places in migrant homes but only eight migrants accepted the offer.
“They preferred to stay in the shanty towns, just abuse, and illegality,” he explained.
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Salvini himself said that he was happy about the clearing of the camp, saying the migrant camps was a place "where degradation, lawlessness, and exploitation proliferated.”
“After years of talk, now the facts have come I thank those who helped achieve this result, starting with the prefect,” he added.
The removal of squatter camps was one of the main pillars in the recently passed migration and security decree drafted by Salvini in 2018.
In Italy, Salvini has become synonymous with the “ruspa” or bulldozer after promising to clean up the country.
