"Luxury" migrant camp sparks row on Italian island

LAMPEDUSA, Italy, May 28 (Reuters) The barbed wire has gone and the dormitories look basic but reasonably clean. Welcome to the new-look camp for immigrants on the island of Lampedusa.

Two years ago the island, a major transit point for thousands of boat people seeking a better life in Europe, drew scathing criticism for the squalor and abuse of its overcrowded camp.

That has now been revamped and will soon be replaced by a more spacious, air-conditioned site as Italy pledges a more humane approach in its fight against illegal immigration.

But the plan has not gone down well with Lampedusa's residents, who echo complaints heard elsewhere in Europe that their political leaders are doing more for illegal immigrants than for their own citizens.

This month they sent a clear message to Romano Prodi's centre-left government by voting en masse for a right-wing coalition -- including the Northern League party that long dismissed Italy's impoverished south as beyond hope to run the island.

''Lampedusa doesn't have a proper hospital, and its schools are literally falling to pieces. And now they want to open a luxury hotel for immigrants? No way,'' said Angela Maraventano, the new deputy mayor and the only member of the populist, anti-immigrant League to have won office south of Tuscany.

Lampedusa Italy's southernmost point just 113 km (70 miles) off Africa's coast -- is emblematic of the dilemmas faced by European governments wrestling with illegal immigration.

Tougher laws under Italy's previous centre-right administration earned it international condemnation and did not stop 74,000 immigrants reaching the island in the past five years more than 12 times the population of around 6,000.

The softer stance taken by Prodi, which includes a proposal to give ''clandestini'' money to return to their homeland, is in turn triggering a popular backlash in a country where 43 per cent see immigrants as a threat to public security, according to a recent poll.

NOT AN HOTEL Lampedusa's old camp, which opened in 1998, became a byword for misery after an undercover reporter exposed appalling living conditions, chronic overcrowding and serious abuses by police.

The United Nations' refugee agency UNHCR denounced it as squalid, pressuring authorities to give humanitarian workers a permanent presence at the site, where the fate of immigrants asylum or expulsion is decreed.

That was granted last year and aid workers say conditions have since improved.

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