This is the best summary I could come up with:

“Mass illegal immigration is a phenomenon no EU member state can handle alone,” said Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni at a joint news conference in Rome with her Albanian counterpart, Edi Rama.

Meloni, who heads the right-wing, nationalist Brothers of Italy party, came to power in 2022 promising to curb immigration but year-on-year, arrivals have nearly doubled.

Despite Meloni’s election promise to stop boat crossings from North Africa, more than 145,000 people have arrived in Italy by sea so far in 2023, compared to around 88,000 in the same period in 2022.

The agreement between Italy and Albania is the first of its kind struck between an EU member country and a non-EU state, similar to the plan laid out by the United Kingdom to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, which was halted after a court found it unlawful.

Albania’s prime minister defended his country’s involvement in the plan, calling Italy’s location in the Mediterranean its “curse.”

Riccardo Magi, the president of the left-wing More Europe party, said on X the deal would lead to the creation of “a sort of Italian Guantánamo, outside of any international standard, outside of the EU without the possibility of monitoring the detention status of the people locked up in these centres.”

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