Migrant disobedience

The idea of migrants as resisters and disobeyers is one that is still awaiting substantial theorizing, yet migrants on the fringe of Europe and the Law, already seem to be aware of the potential of acts of protest and disobedience to attract attention to their plight.
This week, about 600 asylum seekers broke out of an immigration center on the Italian island of Lampedusa to protest their treatment. The act was largely symbolic and political (there was nowhere much to go), and involved forcing open the gates, walking to the center of the island and back.
The protest does not seem to have been directed at the denial of asylum as such (most of them are waiting) or the principle of one needing to require asylum (that would have been quite radical) but, more plainly, at the extremely bad conditions of their detention. Apparently, 2 000 people have to fit in a structure that was built for 850, a situation that has been criticized by the United Nations (Malta was also recently pinpointed). However, it is also interesting that the asylum seekers used "Freedom!" as one of their slogans, suggesting that it is not simply the conditions but the very fact of detention which they see as problematic.
The protests do show a keen ability for political organization by the asylum seekers themselves, as opposed to the concerned public opinion and groups (see for example in Italy in 2002, Australia in 2004, or Denmark in 2008) surrounding them, as has been mostly the case so far. It can also be seen as part of a growing series of gestures of defiance by asylum seekers, in a world in which their situation must surely rank as one of the most precarious and worrying.