During the 2000s the local authorities began to get concerned by the number of arrivals coming from North Africa and were forced to build a holding centre for them. The original centre was designed to hold up to 350 people, the idea being that the migrants would be processed quickly and then moved on up by boat into Sicily or mainland Italy where their claims for asylum could be assessed. But the new centre swiftly proved inadequate for the task because of the numbers that started arriving. At 500 the centre is overcrowded. At points in the 2000s there were as many as two thousand people at a time and the migrant centre spilled out all around into a tent-city. At such moments local resentment risked becoming a problem.

Throughout this time, and cash-strapped though the country was, Italy carried the financial and human burden of this process almost unaided. Unsurprisingly, the government also improvised. During what would be the last decade of Colonel Gaddafi’s rule in Libya the Italians entered into a covert agreement with his regime to return those Africans who had no right to remain and had to be deported from Italy. When the details of this arrangement emerged, Italy was roundly criticised by other European countries. But the country was only experiencing the sort of concerns and compromises that everybody else in Europe would encounter next. Soon, in a pattern that would also become familiar to everyone else, if it hadn’t been before, almost everybody who arrived on Lampedusa stayed in Italy. Even when their asylum claims were processed and turned down, appeals lodged and also turned down and deportation orders issued, they still stayed. The numbers coming in were too great and the whole process was already far too costly for the additional costs of often forcible repatriation to be added in. At some point, whether as an official nod or as part of an unofficial acceptance of the inevitable, it was deemed not just too economically costly but too diplomatically costly to return people to where they came from. It was easier to let them dissolve into the country, perhaps to try to move around into the rest of Europe if they could, or if not to stay in Italy and find a way to live. Some would find a path to citizenship. Most would enter the country’s or the continent’s black economy, often working at rates not much above those they would get back home – and often for gangs from their own country that constituted their sole network in Europe.