Italy migrant crisis: Nearly 7,000 migrants arrive in just over 24 hours

FRANCE 24 English

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00:00 arriving one after the other.

00:02 Dinghy boats form a steady line as they approach the coast of Lampedusa,

00:07 after a journey across the Mediterranean Sea.

00:10 The island is the first port of call for many people fleeing from northern Africa,

00:16 as they attempt to make their way further into Europe.

00:19 But the tiny isle is overwhelmed by recent arrivals.

00:24 Over the course of 24 hours, around 6,800 migrants disembarked from 120 boats.

00:31 That's a few hundred people more than Lampedusa's full-time population.

00:36 We had a big increase of the arrivals of migrants this summer.

00:41 We are more or less with the numbers we had in 2016, which was an exceptional year.

00:48 What seems to be a bit different is that now we do have a different government,

00:54 more right-wing, more anti-migration.

00:59 Giorgia Maloney had made curbing immigration a centrepiece of her election campaign one year ago,

01:06 previously calling for a physical blockade to prevent boats from leaving African shores.

01:13 And as migrants head further north into Europe,

01:16 leaders are pressuring Maloney to respect EU asylum rules.

01:20 Germany says it will no longer voluntarily accept refugees coming from Italy.

01:25 Out of over 12,400 takeover requests to Italy this year, 10 transfers have taken place.

01:33 So for now, we will no longer be sending our teams to Italy to conduct interviews.

01:38 Italian authorities say its reception centres are overcrowded,

01:42 and that part of the reason for the increase was a bottleneck in Tunisia's ports,

01:47 where smugglers were prevented from launching boats for several days because of the rough seas.

01:52 For now, in an attempt to ease overcrowding, hundreds of migrants are being transferred to Sicily.

01:59 (audience laughing)

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