Europe’s once biggest migrant centre closes in Italy

MINEO: What was once Europe’s biggest migrant reception centre, in Mineo in Sicily, officially closed on Tuesday in the presence of its biggest critic, far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini.

"We’re saving quite a bit of money, we’re working to find new jobs for the centre’s ex-workers, but Sicily, Catania and Mineo cannot base their future on immigration," Salvini said as he shut the centre.

Salvini said the future was "in smaller and more controlled centres", after the final inhabitants were removed last week to be sent to another centre in Calabria. About 50 former workers at the centre and unionists protested ahead of Salvini’s arrival, handing a protest banner reading "today we celebrate the funeral of Mineo".

The reception centre, a former housing complex for the US military that resembles an American suburb, is now guarded by Italian troops blocking access under a roasting Sicilian sun.

At its peak in 2014, Mineo housed more than 4,100 people. Its population then steadily dropped and when anti-migrant Salvini and the populist Five Star Movement came to power in June last year, it housed 2,500.