On a freezing night outside Milano Centrale, three Afghan men stand in the fog, their first moments on Italian soil. Two of them spent a year crossing borders in smugglers’ vans. The third fled Germany, where he’d built a life for three years, only to watch his country turn hostile to people like him.
Their arrival in Milan tells a story Europe doesn’t want to hear right now.
While Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government pours tens of millions into stopping migrants at sea, Milan is doing something radically different. The city, led by a center-left mayor, is betting that integration works better than walls. It’s a quiet rebellion, happening in shelters and classrooms and on cold railway station platforms, while the continent builds higher fences.
The Fortress Mentality Isn’t Working
Here’s the uncomfortable truth that Meloni’s government doesn’t want to admit: people keep coming anyway. The patrols, the detention centers, the restrictions on rescue charities, the deals with Tunisia and Libya to turn boats around, the deportations. Last year, 66,316 people still arrived by sea despite all of it.
Some of those violent tactics at sea have endangered migrants and smugglers alike. The detention centers in Libya are documented torture chambers. Human rights groups have recorded widespread abuse. And for what? The number barely dipped.
“This idea of Europe as a fortress that is closing is pointless because people find ways to enter anyway,” says Lamberto Bertolé, Milan’s commissioner for health and welfare. He’s not wrong. You can’t build a wall high enough to stop desperation.
The real issue isn’t that Europe has too many migrants. It’s that Europe’s governments have decided migrants are a problem to be hidden rather than a reality to be managed.
What Milan Is Actually Doing
The numbers tell part of the story. Foreign nationals make up about 9 percent of Italy’s population but nearly 38 percent of its homeless. Milano Centrale stays packed with people seeking warmth. Yet Milan’s city council has built something different here.
Casa dell’Accoglienza Enzo Jannacci, a residential facility on the southern outskirts, houses over 500 people, migrants and Italians alike. It’s not glamorous. It’s functional. Kids go to school. People access healthcare. Asylum seekers get legal support while their claims are processed.
There’s an art class where children from Tunisia, Nigeria, El Salvador, and Afghanistan paint together. Where a 9-year-old from Tunisia raps in Italian he’s learning on the fly. Where an 8-year-old draws Spiderman while his mother, Leila, watches from Nigeria, trying to rebuild everything she lost.
Leila spent five years in Germany training to be a nurse, integrating, building a life. Then Germany got strict, and friends started getting deported. She came to Milan because word travels in migrant communities. This city helps. This city doesn’t treat you like a problem.
The Vicious Circle Nobody Talks About
What happens when you push people to the margins? They stay marginalized. Then politicians point to that marginalization as proof that migrants are a threat. Then governments justify closing borders even more. The cycle spins tighter.
“The Meloni government’s policies push migrants to the margins of a society and this marginalization creates more strain within that society,” Bertolé says. “This only generates more fear, which encourages the government to try to close its borders more. So it’s a vicious circle.”
It’s obvious once you see it. Milan chose to break the cycle instead of feeding it.
The International Rescue Committee patrols Milano Centrale at night with hot tea and warm gloves, not just handouts but human dignity. They help people find shelter, access healthcare, navigate a system designed to confuse them. It costs money. It requires staff. It demands that people see migrants as people first.
The Cost of Not Choosing
The real story here isn’t that Milan’s approach is perfect. It’s that the alternative is so obviously broken. Italy’s central government has left cities to figure out migration on their own while funneling money into border enforcement that doesn’t work.
Nearly 1,000 more unaccompanied migrant children than the state provides places for. That’s Milan’s problem to solve because the national government decided it wasn’t. When you abandon people to the streets in winter, don’t act surprised when they freeze.
Milena and Nicole, two sisters from El Salvador living at the center, want to go to university in Italy. One wants to study photography. The other wants to work in a neonatal ward. These are the stories nobody tells when they talk about “the migrant crisis.” Not crises. People with plans.
What Leila Knows That Politicians Don’t
After everything, after the years of trying, the Mediterranean crossing while pregnant, the failed attempt at Germany, starting over in Milan with her two children, Leila was asked how she feels about building a life in a Europe that doesn’t want her.
“I wasn’t given an option in heaven to choose the country to be born into,” she said. “Everyone has a vision to have a better life. And I am still trying to have that better life.”
That’s the sentence that breaks the whole hardline policy argument in half. She didn’t choose poverty. She didn’t choose conflict. She didn’t choose to be born somewhere that would try to kill her. She’s just trying to live.
Milan gets that. The rest of Europe is still learning, or maybe it just doesn’t want to.
