Can a Divided Europe Handle the Refugee Crisis?
Posted on Sep 15, 2015
By Sebastian Rotella, ProPublica
Refugees waiting at the Keleti Railway Station in Budapest, Hungary in early September. Alexandre Rotenberg / Shutterstock.com
This piece originally ran on ProPublica.
Laura Boldrini, the president of Italy’s Chamber of Deputies, has unusually strong credentials to discuss the immigration crisis gripping Europe. She worked for a quarter century at United Nations humanitarian agencies, serving as spokeswoman in southern Europe for the U.N. High Commission on Refugees.
Boldrini, 54, saw global migration at the front lines: the Italian island of Lampedusa, where seagoing migrants and refugees wash up, dead and alive, on the tides of despair and poverty; the refugee centers in Sicily where human traffickers exploit teenage Nigerian girls forced into prostitution; and the Greek coasts that are beachheads for an unprecedented wave of refugees from Syria and Afghanistan.
In 2013, she was elected to Italy’s Parliament as a candidate of today’s governing center-left coalition. Two days after she took office, she was catapulted into the presidency of lower house of the Legislature, the equivalent of the U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Boldrini recently was in New York City and spoke with ProPublica about the immigration drama. European Union leaders have since moved closer to approving a plan to accept 160,000 refugees, though many see it as insufficient. This interview has been translated from Italian and edited for brevity.
Q. What are the roots of Europe’s immigration crisis and what are the solutions?: .........
Full article: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/can_a_divided_europe_handle_the_refugee_crisis_20150915