Albanian PM says migration deal with Italy is ‘one-off’

Albania’s migrant deal with Italy is a “one-off” despite interest from other governments, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama has said, dashing the hopes of some EU capitals of replicating the move.

Rome and Tirana agreed last year to set up centres in Albania where a few thousand Italy-bound migrants would be registered and then wait for their asylum claim to be processed by Italian officials.

The plan drew criticism from rights groups but also sparked interest from some right-of-centre European governments. The centre-right European People’s party even made it part of its elections platform for the June elections to the European parliament.

“It is a one-off, 100 per cent a one-off,” Rama told the Financial Times in an interview. He said that other governments had approached him to see if they could replicate the arrangement with Italy. “I said no. Because it doesn’t make sense to me. Italy is very special to us, more than a strategic relation. It’s a very deeply rooted friendship.”

Rama said the Italy deal was based on a long history of mutual law enforcement — the Italian coast guard helping Albania control emigration in the 1990s, and more recent joint efforts against drug smuggling.

Critics argue the plan is fraught with human rights and legal problems, and high costs. But it is not a new idea.

Western partners have tried to get Albania’s help with immigrants since it welcomed thousands of Afghans left exposed to the Taliban after western powers pulled out in 2020. The list started with the UK prime minister.

“Boris Johnson called me and said, I praise your leadership, let’s do something together,” Rama recalled. “Let’s have an agreement that Britain will bring to Albania the illegal immigrants to keep them there, to process. I said, sorry, this is not possible.”

Unlike the Italian deal, which is for housing up to 3,000 people at a time, the UK offer was “not a fixed number”, Rama said. “It was about everyone that comes to Britain . . . like a transit. I said there’s no way. Then, we had others I’m not going to mention. Among the richest countries in Europe.”

He cautioned against treating immigration as a security problem and especially for governments trying to outsource it. “This issue cannot be tackled by transferring the problem,” he said.

Besides Albania, other Balkans countries could also help if the process were structured well and kept within international law, he said. But Europe turned it into an ideological, electoral issue and forgot it would need people to avoid a “demographic winter” and a resulting economic downturn.

More than a million Albanians have migrated to the EU and the UK over the years, a third of the country’s total population.

The war in Ukraine had finally changed the game on enlargement, Rama said, chalking up “the best record” for the outgoing EU executive. “Also thanks to Vladimir Putin, a shift has happened already.”

The EU’s new proposed plans to include the western Balkan countries in practical avenues of co-operation, such as easy and cheap money transfers or reduced bureaucracy of cross-border trade, would have been “impossible to imagine five years ago”, he said.

“It’s not about the money,” he said, referring to a €6bn package offered to the Balkans — a sum most countries in the region consider modest. “It’s about opening up paths to integrate and to have the same conditions as the members, while not being still a member.”

A critic of the EU’s slow enlargement process, Rama noted that the bloc’s moral authority was fading.

“Europe has been Balkanised,” he said. “We still look to Europe as a place where we will be protected from blow-ups of nationalism which brings us to conflicts and wars. [But] nationalist movements in Europe have not only found a space in politics but have infected or affected [other movements].”