€72,461 per bed. That’s how much Italy is now spending to build offshore migrant centres in Albania, more than 11 times the cost of similar facilities at home according to an investigation published by Follow the Money.
This was Giorgia Meloni’s grand plan: a tough-on-migration deal to transfer those intercepted at sea to Albania, fast-track their asylum claims, and repatriate them. Her government called it “extraordinary”, and the EU’s Ursula von der Leyen even praised it as “out-of-the-box thinking.”
But why has Italy’s offshore migration policy evolved into a costly and legally questionable scheme?
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