The NGO ActionAid, in collaboration with the foundation Openpolis, released a new online platform to map the situation of migrants centers in Italy. The online platform, called “Centri d’Italia”, aims at filling the knowledge gap by providing detailed data on the centers for asylum-seekers and refugees in Italy. It provides information on the the types of centers, their availabili ties, costs and the names of the organizations responsible for operating them. The site and information is so far only available in Italian.
The first analysis of the data shows that the current Italian migrant support system is characterized by emergency, lack of programming and large aggregation of migrants in only a few centers.
In fact, most asylum-seekers and refugees are detained in large institutions located in Milan and Rome, where services are limited: for example, each migrant is entitled to have only 12 minutes of cultural and linguistic mediation service per week.
ActionAid regrets that this project was not launched or supported by the Italian Government and stresses that any migration policy needs to be based on adequate data instead of any political motives.