News stories by Matt Carr

CLAY CROSS, Britain, May 05 (IPS) - The social consequences of austerity economics have been most visible in Europe's southern periphery. In the UK, the coalition government has brought in sharp cutbacks in welfare state provision in the name of dealing with the financial crisis. Their impact is becoming increasingly visible.

It’s 10 am on Saturday morning and a group of migrants is clustered round the entrance to the Migrant Clothes Association in the Calais city centre, eating breakfast provided by the association. Inside, the warehouse is stacked with blankets, tents, trainers and clothes. Some of these will be distributed later by the association’s workers.

It’s more than two years since French police demolished the migrant squatter camp in Calais known as the Jungle in September 2009. At the time the widely-publicised demolition was hailed by the French and British authorities as a major blow to the smugglers or passeurs who facilitated illegal immigration across the Channel.

It’s only a few hundred metres from the rocky hillside overlooking Lampedusa’s commercial port to the other side of the protected bay. For more than a decade this narrow strip of ocean has been a migratory gateway into Europe for tens of thousands of mostly African migrants. The numbers have risen and fallen in response to shifting government policies and geopolitical developments.

It’s 4.30 in the morning and the full moon is low in the sky above Lampedusa harbour as the Guardia di Finanza patrol boat escorts a fishing boat containing 19 Tunisian migrants into the closed military port. They include six women, one child and — to the amusement of the Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) team - one sheep. The migrants are driven away in a coach to one of the two holding centres, some of them wrapped in silver emergency blankets. But the sheep remains in the port.

The British Home Office has ruled that a severely disabled five-year-old girl should be returned to Algeria. The ruling demonstrates just how tough some European governments are getting on immigration.

The momentous political events in North Africa have been accompanied by increasingly apocalyptic warnings from the Italian government of a mass influx of unwanted immigration from Tunisia and Libya.

In September 2009 French police bulldozed the migrant encampment at Sangatte near Calais, inhabited by hundreds of mostly Afghan asylum seekers seeking to reach the United Kingdom. The destruction of the Sangatte ‘jungle’ was carried out in the full glare of publicity, and the French and UK governments hailed it as a major blow against illegal immigration.