EUROPE

Displaced Again and Again, Some African Migrants Had No Plan to Land in Italy

By 
Agyemin Boateng, a Ghanaian, at a detention center in Sicily. He said he left Libya because of increasing violence there. Lynsey Addario for The New York Times 
SYRACUSE, Sicily — By now, the unceasing tides of migrants arriving at the ports of Sicily fall into loose national categories.
The Syrians usually arrive with money, bearing broken lives in canvas bags, and are able to slip out of Italy, bound for affluent northern Europe. The Eritreans may be far less wealthy but they too are well organized, with networks that move them north as well.
Then there are men like Agyemin Boateng and Prince Adawiah, who were scooped out of the Mediterranean this month by an Italian rescue ship. Both are from Ghana, and neither has a plan for a new life in Europe — nor, they say, did either of them ever plan to come to Italy. They were working as laborers in Libya, until life there became untenable and returning to Ghana became unfeasible.
“There are guns and bombs,” said Mr. Adawiah, 25, who worked in Tripoli for nearly three years. “Every day, there is shooting. I’m afraid. That is why I traveled to Italy.”
Europe’s migration crisis escalated sharply in April, with the coming of warmer weather to the Mediterranean. Many more smugglers’ boats took to the sea, and a record number of migrants died attempting the crossing — more than 1,700 people so far in 2015, by some estimates.
Conflicts in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia have shaped and reshaped Europe’s migrant flows in recent years, with none more transformative to the Mediterranean smuggling trade than the civil war in Syria. And the tumult in Libya is changing the migration equation once again.
Libyan lawlessness has allowed a haven for smugglers to operate along the country’s coastline, but it has also unmoored many African laborers who were working there as migrants. Many of these men now languish in Italian detention centers without contacts or plans for the future, and their growing numbers are frustrating some Italian mayors and other officials.
“We don’t know anything,” said one migrant, Shamsudeen Sawud, 18, who arrived in Italy more than a week ago. “No one is telling us anything.”

Seeking Asylum 

Routes commonly used by refugees to reach the Libyan coast, 2014-15 
ITALY
Atlantic Ocean
SICILY
Syracuse
Tripoli
SYRIA
Mediterranean
Sea
Benghazi
Debdeb
MIDDLE
EAST
LIBYA
WEST AFRICA
Gao
ERITREA
Khartoum
GAMBIA
Bamako
Niamey
Arabian Sea
EAST AFRICA
GHANA
Source: Frontex 
By The New York Times 
Migration statistics offer a hint of the shift. More than 170,000 migrants and refugees arrived in Italy by sea last year; Syrians and Eritreans were the two largest groups among them, accounting for more than 76,000 people, according to Italy’s Interior Ministry. Gambians ranked a distant fifth. Yet during the first quarter of 2015, a relatively slow period with just 10,165 arrivals — Gambia was the leading country of origin, accounting for 1,413 of the migrants.
The authorities have not published figures for April yet, but humanitarian and migration groups confirm that a majority of the arriving migrants came originally from sub-Saharan African countries — some directly, with Italy as a destination, but many end up here less deliberately.
“We see that even people who had originally moved to Libya with the intention to remain there — including both refugees and migrants — have now decided to flee toward Europe, even though it means risking their lives in a very dangerous journey at sea,” Matteo de Bellis, the Italy representative for Amnesty International, said in an email.
Bruce Leimsidor, an expert on Europe’s asylum system, said a certain amount of skepticism should be applied, because migrants may make such claims in the hope that it will help their requests for asylum in Europe.
Before the fall of the Qaddafi government, Mr. Leimsidor said, hundreds of thousands of West Africans, as well as many Bangladeshis, worked in Libya to save money for an eventual return home, and never planned to move on to Europe, but the situation is very different now.
“It has been several years now that work in Libya for the migrants has been quite scarce,” Mr. Leimsidor, who teaches European asylum law at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, said in an email. Given that scarcity and the dangers of violence in the country, he said, “those who have come into Libya in the last few years have had at least some intention of coming to Europe.”
At the Umberto I detention center in this ancient Sicilian port city, Mohammed Njie, 31, described his route to Italy. He left his home in Gambia seven months ago after a dispute with his boss over unpaid wages. He made his way to Libya, hoping to send money back to his parents and two children, following in the footsteps of older generations of Gambians who worked in Libya and returned home with nest eggs.

Graphic: What’s Behind the Surge in Refugees Crossing the Mediterranean Sea 

“They could buy homes, buy a car,” he said. “They could live a better life.”
Now, though, Mr. Njie and other African migrants at the detention center said there was rampant abuse in Libya. Some men said the construction bosses had stopped paying wages to laborers, and other men who did get their pay said they were preyed upon by criminal gangs, including marauding teenagers who robbed people at gunpoint.
“They know you can’t send money back to Ghana,” said Mr. Adawiah, who had worked in Libya since 2012. “There are no banks. That is why they know that money is with you. That is why they attacked us every day.”
Mr. Boateng said trying to go home from Libya would be perilous because militias and criminals now infest the land routes. He said one Ghanaian man who worked in Libya for three years was robbed of all his savings while trying to make his way home.
“It is difficult to go back to your country, even if you have money,” Mr. Boateng said. “When they see you are black, they know you have money on you.”
Several men said that sympathetic Libyans had put them in touch with smugglers as a means of saving their lives, even as the smugglers were actively seeking black laborers to make the trip. “They say, ‘If you want to save your life, leave, and we will take you to Italy,’” Mr. Adawiah said of the smugglers.
The growing population of migrants in Italy is becoming a political controversy. A group of Italian mayors recently tried to block plans by the national government to distribute migrants to detention centers around the country. Italy has also been criticized for allowing many Syrians and Eritreans to pass through and apply for asylum in northern Europe, a violation of European Union policy.
At the Umberto I center, many of the migrants expressed dismay and uncertainty. Not one had a cellphone or had been able to contact relatives in Africa. (By contrast, Syrian migrants often traveled with smartphones.) None of the migrants knew the status of their asylum applications.
“I want to work,” said Mr. Njie, the Gambian. “I left my family behind, so I want to work. And I want to find peace of mind.”
Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on May 2, 2015, on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Libyan Tumult Alters Europe’s Migration Equation . Order Reprints|  Today's Paper|Subscribe