Ten new identification and expulsion centres (CIEs) for illegal immigrants may be ready by the end of the year, Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said Tuesday.
Speaking on the sidelines of an Italy-Poland bilateral meeting, Maroni said the centres would be opened in ten different Italian regions, ''close to airports, principally military ones and far from inhabited centres''.
There are currently 10 CIEs in nine regions.
Maroni meanwhile said he had asked Premier Silvio Berlusconi to call a confidence vote if parliament scotches a fresh attempt to increase the amount of time immigrants may be held in CIEs from two months to six months.
Earlier this month, Maroni said he was ''furious'' after parliament's lower house, including a number of government MPs, voted to remove a clause extending holding times from an emergency decree.
The minister, who has begun a drive to repatriate illegal immigrants who arrive on Italy's southern shores by boat, said two months was ''insufficient'' to complete a forced expulsion process.
He said the move was ''essentially a pardon for illegal immigrants'' since it meant allowing more than 1,000 people in Italian CIEs to leave the structures this week.
Instead of being screened and forceably expelled, the immigrants were served with expulsion papers requiring them to leave Italy within five days
''We just have to hand the illegal immigrant his papers and invite him to return to his own country, which he is unlikely to do,'' Maroni said.
Maroni has argued that the new detention time would have been in line with a European Union directive which allows illegal immigrants to be held at CIEs for up to 18 months.
The lower house is due to begin examining the bill on Thursday.
According to figures released by the interior ministry earlier this year, around 37,000 people landed on Italian coasts in 2008 - a 75% increase on 2007.
This is over half the total number of migrants who arrived in Europe by sea last year, which totalled around 67,000.
