Press release of the immigration desk of Caltanissetta

There are countries in the world where the relationship with the institutions is the most difficult. Where requesting the recognition of a right means going through humiliation, hostile attitudes, and inhumane and degrading treatments.

Image from Il Fatto Nisseno

Countries where someone is summoned in an office – they do not go there because they just wanted to, they go because they were given a proper appointment – and left waiting outside, under the pouring rain, from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon. Then at 5pm, instead of being received they are given a new appointment for the week after. An appointment in which, again, they will remain waiting outside for eight hours and that will be postponed a month later.

Those are places in which at the entry, it is written in all languages, that the office opens from 9:00 until 12:00, to then find out that it never opens before 9:30am. Places where the people, lined outside since the early morning, are not received in the office at the long awaited opening; they are flocked like beasts behind a steal grating where an official, looking tired and listless, looks at the piece of paper that is given to him through the grid and gives them another appointment.

These places are not found in the liberated Libya, they are in Caltanissetta, the Migration Office, in Contrada Pian del Lago. Anyone can assist to this show provided everyday by the authorities and be ashamed of it. Like it happens to us.

Immigration Desk, Via Re d’Italia 14, Caltanissetta.

Translation: Inés Fanlo Morales