An armoured personnel carrier stands next to a police car at the gates to the camp. The soldiers in the back of the army vehicle have the rear door open to get a bit of a breeze blowing through their steel box.

As soon as I stroll up to the gates of Cara Mineo migrant holding camp, two soldiers with rifles intercept me.

A few hundred yards away, migrants have cut two openings in the perimeter fence and are brazenly wandering in and out in broad daylight.

Some are walking in with shopping bags. A trio of young men are going in the other direction, escorting a heavily made-up young woman wearing huge fake eyelashes to a waiting car. I suspect she is a prostitute with an appointment elsewhere.

This is the new frontline of the European Union’s migration crisis — and it is a shambles, a system mired in allegations of Mafia corruption and official ineptitude.

It is hard not to conclude that the security operation here is simply a front, aimed at trying to reassure locals.

Handling the immigration issue is Lega leader Matteo Salvini (pictured), the new Interior Minister

They certainly need reassurance. For, later this month, a migrant from this camp is due in court, accused of slitting the throat of an old man in his bed, raping his wife, throwing her over a balcony to her death and running off with their belongings.

This incident was the most shocking of many, but then I’m told that petty crime is the ‘new normal’ round here.

What irks most Sicilians is the chaotic way migrants are being dealt with.

This rural part of the Italian island houses thousands of migrants as a lumbering government bureaucracy takes an astonishing two years to process each claim for asylum — despite the fact that the large majority are, by their own admission, economic migrants and, therefore, not in need of asylum.

Of more than 3,000 asylum-seekers at the Cara Mineo — Italy’s largest migrant reception centre — the number of refugees from the Syrian war, according to the latest data, is zero.

Compare that with the number from, for example, non-war-torn Bangladesh — 289 — or Nigeria, which tops the list at 685.

The fact is that all the migrants photographer Mark Richards and I meet freely admit they are here for a job and a better life. Having paid their life’s savings to people-smugglers and risked death in a leaky boat to get this far, their desperation to be allowed to remain in Europe is understandable.

Now, after years of freely crossing the Mediterranean — with about 400,000 asylum applications being submitted in Italy since 2014 — would-be migrants face a fresh obstacle in the form of a new hardline Italian government.

In power for just a week, the new coalition has issued migrants with a warning which has appalled Brussels: ‘Pack your bags and go home.’

The EU commissars have now become much more concerned about what is happening in Italy than they are with Brexit. For they are confronted with the first avowedly Eurosceptic government in a major eurozone EU democracy.

Critics have branded it Europe’s first ‘populist’ government. To which its leaders reply: ‘Guilty as charged.’

The new government is an alliance of the Eurosceptic anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the hard-Right equally Eurosceptic Lega (or ‘League’).

The former threatens to plunge the EU into crisis and endanger the single currency system by defying Brussels with a £90 billion plan for a new universal income and a lower retirement age.

Italy’s national debt is a staggering 132 per cent of its gross domestic product and stands at £2 trillion. The European Central Bank, which has already helped Italy stave off bankruptcy, would imperil its own future if it allowed a new spending spree. In short, Italy is too big to bail out.

The government’s other big plans, driven by the Lega, focus on immigration, with tough new measures to stop fresh waves of economic migrants and to deport those already here.

So is the new Italian government serious? Or will it just make a lot of noise and then fall victim to the usual political paralysis and inertia in a country that has had 65 governments since the war?

He has made a point of visiting Sicily as quickly as possible as it is the main destination for migrants travelling from North Africa

This week, the new Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte, defended his government against accusations of being populist and anti-establishment. ‘If populism is the attitude of leaders to listen to the people and if “anti-establishment” removes the old privileges of power, then this government deserves both descriptions,’ said the former lawyer.

Handling the immigration issue is Lega leader Matteo Salvini, the new Interior Minister. He has made a point of visiting Sicily as quickly as possible as it is the main destination for migrants travelling from North Africa.

This week, at least 48 migrants, many of them children, drowned when their boat overturned off the Tunisian coast, bound for Italian waters.

Salvini visited a reception centre in the southern Sicilian port town of Pozzallo, where 185 African migrants had just landed. He warned that unless Brussels helps combat the flood of what he calls ‘non-refugees’, then Italy will take drastic measures.

‘Italy and Sicily cannot be Europe’s refugee camp,’ he said as he emerged from the fortified compound in the harbour. His anger was not with the migrants themselves, he said, but with the criminals who perpetuate this trade in human misery.

Salvini wants to target the people-smugglers as well as the whole network of organised crime behind them, including the Italian Mafia. He has also singled out some charities which help illegal migrants. Italy’s new prime minister called all this ‘the immigration business’.

I head for the centre in Pozzallo to find it empty, though there is still an armoured car and some bored-looking soldiers sitting outside for appearance’s sake.

Known as a ‘Hotspot’, it is one of several transit centres where new arrivals are brought ashore after their boats are intercepted at sea by naval patrols. Here, they will be registered and have their fingerprints taken before being dispersed to reception centres across the region.

A member of staff tells me they have just finished cleaning the place ahead of the next boatload. It could arrive at any minute.

Many arrivals will be sent on to the vast Cara Mineo reception centre an hour’s drive away inland. This former U.S. military base is a cross between a prison and a council estate.

Around the edges are several children’s playgrounds. All are empty. That is because there are hardly any children. The majority of migrants are young, single men, mainly from Africa and Central Asia, plus a few young women.

Once they have been registered, they are free to check in and out with a pass and receive a basic €2.5 pocket money a day, plus food and accommodation.

Most will spend months, if not years here, watching television or playing football.

If their application for asylum is approved, they will be free to build a new life in Italy or, thanks to EU freedom of movement rules, any of the 28 countries in the EU. However, if rejected — and the appeals process can take two years — they are issued with a foglio di via, a letter telling them to leave the country. At which point, unsurprisingly, most simply disappear into the black economy.

They are stateless, homeless, vulnerable and desperate. And that is why there are these holes in the fence at Cara Mineo. They have been made by failed asylum-seekers who want to come and go while they consider what to do next.

This huge complex is like the notorious ‘Jungle’ migrant camp at Calais, except that it has electricity, water and its own self-contained economy.

As I walk around the perimeter, a van arrives opposite one of the holes in the fence and sets up a shop in an adjacent field.

Business is brisk as some migrants come out of the camp via the main gates, while those who are unregistered simply emerge through the holes in the fence. A 26-year-old woman called Adeyemi, from Nigeria, tells me she was ‘trafficked’ by a family friend who promised her ‘a better life’ in Europe and that she’s been here for four months waiting for her ‘documents’ to come through.

I chat to Abdesselem El Kaihal, 30, from Morocco, who has just been to the local town on a bike. He is a qualified electrical engineer who speaks English and French and says he was forced to leave his homeland due to unspecified ‘family problems’. He has been here for more than a year and has a room of his own.

With access to funds from home, he has bought his own TV. ‘It’s very bad in there. Nothing happens. I just want to work,’ he says. ‘As soon as I get my passport, I will go to another country.’ The girl with the eyelashes and her three male escorts walk past. I try to talk to her, but one of the men, whom I am later told is her pimp, warns me off, saying: ‘No porno!’ Apparently producers of pornography come here to recruit cheap labour.

Cara Mineo migrant holding camp has become the new frontline of the European Union’s migration crisis (pictured: refugees walking through Catania in Italy)

No one mentions having escaped wars or persecution. Nor have they heard of Italy’s new hardline Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini, and his plans to shake up the system. But they are plans which seem to be going down well with the locals.

In the suburbs of Catania, 50 miles away, I meet Fabio Cantarella, lawyer and candidate for the city council. He is also one of the Lega’s main organisers here in Sicily, a place where it has never previously enjoyed much support. Until recently, the party was called the Northern League and wanted to abandon the impoverished lower half of Italy.

Down here, it had the same sort of support which, say, the Scottish National Party might enjoy in Kent.

Now that has changed completely. Cantarella helped organise last weekend’s tour for his ministerial friend, Salvini, and says opinion is changing fast.

‘When we took Salvini to the local market last weekend, the crowd was so big that he couldn’t get inside,’ says Cantarella. ‘A few years ago, you would get tomatoes and eggs thrown at you if you said you were from the Lega.

‘Now people are listening. We have thousands of undocumented people wandering around Sicily and there is no integration. People are scared.’

He points out that the Mafia are doing good business through the contracts awarded for running the migrant centres. A company running a centre will be paid up to €40 a day for each resident — offering handsome returns for those who keep the costs down.

‘These companies have been infiltrated by organised crime,’ he tells me. ‘That is what Salvini is going to change.’

He points to the awful story of Vincenzo and Mercedes Solano, an elderly couple in the town of Palagonia, a few miles from the Cara Mineo migrant camp. In 2015, both were murdered in their apartment.

A few hours later, Mamadou Kamara, from Ivory Coast, returned to the camp and was caught wearing Vincenzo’s bloodstained trousers and slippers, and carrying Mercedes’s phone.

Police arrived at the apartment to discover a scene so shocking that, three years later, the place is still boarded up.

Despite DNA evidence, Kamara denies murder and the case continues at a snail’s pace, returning to court in a fortnight.

Not surprisingly, the victims’ family are furious that the case is dragging on. ‘All we want is justice,’ says the couple’s daughter, Rosita, who is a teacher in Milan. ‘I wrote to many people in government, but no one replied.’

‘It’s ridiculous that it is taking so long,’ says their lawyer, Francesco Manduca. He is well aware of the chaotic system at the camp and says that, while the murders are exceptional, there have been numerous reports of sexual assault and theft in the area.

He also points out that Italy has a rule imposing a curfew on migrant centres at night.

‘If they had stuck to the rules, the murders would not have happened,’ he says.

In the cafe in Palagonia, tempers are still running extremely high.

‘My mother is too scared even to go to the chemist on her own,’ says trainee teacher Raffaele Benincasa, 26.

Carmelo, the barman, tells me that since the murders, the whole town has become vehemently anti-migrant. ‘People are more racist and drive their cars towards them if they see them on the road,’ he says.

To be fair, there are many people who accuse the new government of simply blaming Italy’s woes on impoverished outsiders.

They point out that migration numbers are down by 75 per cent on this stage last year, following a deal to train Libyan coastguards to stop the smugglers.

However, Salvini has claimed that new migrant routes to Italy are opening up, and that, in any case, the country has a serious crisis with the numbers already inside its £3.8 billion-a-year migration system plus an estimated 500,000 illegal overstayers.

He wants other EU countries to take a larger share of migrants and says he plans to speed up the asylum-seeking process, pointing out that two-thirds of trans-Mediterranean migration last year came to Italy.

‘France and Germany cannot leave the burden of this disaster on the shoulders of the coastal nations,’ says Salvini, pledging crack-downs and deportations.

Here in Sicily, after talking to locals of all ages in cities and in the countryside, I cannot find anyone who disagrees with him.