Imagine for a moment that you are a racist Western government plagued by an influx of asylum seekers, many of them dark-skinned. Wouldn’t you dream of packing them off to a distant land to be dealt with out of sight and out of mind?

Well, that dream is now becoming a reality for Italy, where Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of the far-right Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) party is overseeing an agreement with the Balkan nation of Albania to open two processing centres for seaborne asylum seekers intercepted en route to Italian shores.

Located in the northern Albanian towns of Shengjin and Gjader, the centres are expected to hold up to 36,000 people per year. The scheme will cost Italy at least 670 million euros ($720m) for the initial five-year period – but the price tag is apparently worth it in terms of racking up xenophobic nationalist points for the government.

Meloni, who rode to power on an array of fascist-friendly promises including a pledge to curb immigration, travelled to Albania on June 5 to visit the migrant penal colonies – pardon, asylum processing centres – which she says will be up and running by August. The visit was timed to coincide with the eve of European Union elections, in which Fratelli d’Italia fared spectacularly.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has praised the Italy-Albania agreement as an “important initiative” that constitutes an “example of out-of-the-box thinking, based on fair........

© Al Jazeera