Lampedusa — the door to Europe. When the majority becomes the minority... Modern African emigration to the European continent

Islands have always played a special role in migration processes. A long memory and historical
experience of the 19th and 20th centuries emigration to the United States has created
a cultural paradigm of island as a phenomenon of uncertain. The island was a place of welcome and hope, but at the same time the constituting elements of an island — isolation
at sea and division from the continent — were terrifying to migrants.
Migrations between continents, despite the passage of time, reproduce the patterns
known from the past. Analysis of the phenomenon of the island is inseparably linked
with the analysis of contemporary African migration to Lampedusa. Over the last
25 years, Lampedusa, which constitutes the aim of migrants’ journeys, surely extends
the paradigm of Ellis Island and is at the same time shaping a new model of immigrant /
the African / the European.