World Notes

The refugees began turning up in southern Italy's fishing villages aboard commandeered vessels ranging from tugboats to freighters. In the space of six days last week, 20,000 Albanians fled worsening shortages of food and other essentials in their impoverished homeland and sought asylum across the Adriatic's Strait of Otranto. Startled local authorities in Italy did their | best to provide temporary accommodations in schools and army barracks, but thousands of the Albanians were soon forced to camp out on town docks, wrapping themselves in plastic sheets for warmth.

But not for long. Following an emergency Cabinet session in Rome, Deputy Prime Minister Claudio Martelli declared that "this exodus cannot continue." The vast majority of Albania's visitors are "not political refugees but economic refugees," he said, and as such they fail to qualify for asylum under Italian law and will be returned home within a few days by Italian ships. That decision, doubtless influenced by Italy's 11% unemployment rate, was the most dramatic display to date of Western Europe's growing reluctance to receive waves of immigrants from the East.