What happened
The Albania scheme sat alongside a less-publicised parallel reality: while pursuing hardline deterrence rhetoric and the offshore detention model, Meloni's government simultaneously and quietly expanded legal migration channels, issuing 368,000 work permits to non-EU nationals between October 2022 and December 2024 through the decreto flussi mechanism, with plans for 450,000 more through 2025 — a response to genuine labour shortages that sits uneasily with the government's public messaging on migration.
The Albania centres themselves became a symbol of the gap between announcement and delivery: repeatedly built up as flagship policy, repeatedly rejected by both domestic courts and the EU's own top court on the same basic legal ground — that migrants' countries of origin could not credibly be classed as safe.