Italy will step up efforts to fingerprint migrants, even if it means using force, at immigration centres to be run jointly by European officials and local police, according to the official in charge of implementing national immigration policy.

Italian administrator Mario Morcone said yesterday he expects to collect fingerprints from up to 90 per cent of the migrants.

“Certainly there’s going to be a greater determination to get the fingerprints,” Morcone said. Italy will allow a “proportionate” use of force to obtain fingerprints, which it has not done regularly in the past, “to the extent that it is compatible with Italian law”.

Of the more than half a million refugees and migrants to arrive in Europe by boat across the Mediterranean this year, 131,000 have come through Italy, making it a frontline state in the continent’s biggest refugee crisis since World War II. In recent years, Italy has failed to identify thousands of migrants who landed on its shores mainly because the refugees refused to be fingerprinted in order to sidestep EU law, which says they must ask for asylum in the country where they enter the bloc. This has led northern countries to accuse Italy of undermining the Schengen Area, where there is free movement of people between countries, by letting migrants move on unchecked.

Italy will allow use of force to obtain fingerprints

The EU agreed to a plan last week aimed in part at helping border countries like Italy and Greece deal with the surge by relocating asylum seekers to non-border countries.

But the plan also foresees setting up “hotspots” in the border countries to screen migrants more carefully. Morcone offered a first glimpse of how, starting in November, the hotspots in Italy will work, saying that whoever does not agree to give their fingerprints, or who does not intend to seek asylum, will be sent to a detention centre to be deported. During the first half of the year, Italy fingerprinted two-thirds of the almost 92,000 migrants who arrived by sea, Morcone said. In the past, Italy has fingerprinted a far smaller proportion.

According to Italian law, migrants can be held at the hotspots only for 48 hours, so within a few days they will be moved to already existing immigration centres.

If a migrant agrees to be fingerprinted and wants to seek asylum, he or she will be moved from the hotspot to an immigration centre whose tenants can come and go as they like while their applications are processed.

If instead a migrant refused to be fingerprinted or does not plan to ask for asylum, he or she will be sent to “Centres for Identification and Expulsion”, to be deported. Migrants can be held under lock and key for up to three months. Asylum is granted or refused to an “individual” and not an “entire category”, Morcone said. However, efforts to detain and deport economic migrants may be undermined by the stark choice migrants will have to make at hotspots. They will be asked to choose between refusing to be fingerprinted, getting locked up and possibly deported, or giving their fingerprints, asking for asylum and moving into an open immigration centre.

Meanwhile, Italian police cleared migrants from tents where they were camped along the coastal road near Ventimiglia at the French border at dawn yesterday, TV broadcasts showed. The Facebook page set up by activists for the makeshift camp said some migrants had jumped into the sea in protest, and all of them had retreated to the rocks along the seaside in the standoff with police.

“The police are blocking the border. We are having breakfast on the rocks. We are not going back,” read a Facebook post.

Migrants who have been turned back at the French border have gathered along the coast near Ventimiglia since June. Police have repeatedly tried to clear the area.

France refuses to let them cross the border because, according to EU law, the migrants are Italy’s responsibility.