Italy: Hundreds of Migrants Continue to Arrive in Lampedusa

Looking for better life opportunities, over 100 migrants Thursday arrived in Lampedusa, the Italian island that is closest to the African continent.

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In the last 24 hours, three ships in precarious conditions reached Italian territory. One of them was a barge with 87 people on board, which was rescued by the Coast Guard.

Currently, the local reception center is over-saturated since 1,136 migrants are living in facilities that barely have a maximum capacity of 200 people.

This situation was further aggravated when 700 people disembarked in Lampedusa over the weekend. The authorities then announced the transfer of several hundred of them to other Italian regions to ease pressure on the small island.

In the first eight months of 2020, over 15,000 migrants arrived by sea to Italy, a figure that is four times greater than the number registered in 2019. Among the migrants, there are 6,500 people from Tunisia, the country with the largest number of citizens in Italian refuge centers.

This week, the European Union (EU) granted Tunisia 10 million euros to buy coastguard boats to stop irregular immigration to Italy.

On Monday, Foreign Affairs Minister Luigi Di Maio warned that migrants arriving on Italian shores will be repatriated to their countries through two weekly flights, a policy that was resumed on August 10 after three months of the border closure.