Italy works to transfer thousands of migrants who reached a tiny island in a day

LAMPEDUSA ISLAND, Italy —  A migrant reception center in Italy’s southernmost island of Lampedusa was overwhelmed Thursday as it grappled with transferring to the mainland thousands of migrants who arrived on small, unseaworthy boats in a 24-hour span this week.

The Red Cross said 4,200 migrants remained at the center out of the 6,800 who had swamped the tiny tourist and fishing island in a flotilla of about 120 boats arriving from Tunisia. Commercial ferries and Italian military vessels were taking migrants from Lampedusa to mainland Italy.

“After a particularly challenging day like yesterday, today people are being continuously transferred,” said Francesca Basile of the Italian Red Cross. “The situation is certainly complex and gradually we are trying to return to normal.”

She said that all of the migrants have been given food and that camping beds were being distributed “so that they don’t sleep in the cold.”

The movements of newly arrived migrants are usually tightly controlled. But with the reception center overflowing, some slipped away and have been spotted all over the island, according to volunteers. On Wednesday, some migrants scuffled for food and bottles of water, according to Sicilian media. Others jumped into the sea to cool off.

As Italian television station Sky TG24 filmed outside the center, people could be seen climbing over a wall in the background.

Some residents handed out pasta, Sicilian rice balls and water to the migrants they encountered. A pair of islanders lugging a carton of fresh peaches stopped to give pieces of fruit to migrants who were exploring Lampedusa’s main tourist street, which is decorated with colored lights and lined with eateries and souvenir shops.

A local firefighter said he asked his mother to cook up a spaghetti meal for several young men from Burkina Faso he ran into, the Italian news agency ANSA said.

“They were exhausted, but above all famished,” ANSA quoted Antonello Di Malta as saying about the migrants his mother fed on their patio. “One of them got down on his knees, asking to eat.”

Sky TG24 said just one migrant boat arrived Thursday on the island, carrying 44 people.

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Lampedusa’s mayor, Filippo Mannino, lashed out at Europe for leaving Italy alone to deal with migrant arrivals by sea, saying its neighbors had “remained silent all these months.” He called for a structural solution to the migrant crisis and told Sky that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had pledged her support.

Speaking at a demographics conference in Hungary, Meloni said the problems created by Italy’s aging population should not be resolved with immigrants working to support the social welfare system and keep the economy humming.

She said she would support a quota system for legal immigration “where necessary and [where it] can be fully integrated.”

Italy’s interior minister, Matteo Piantedosi, consulted by phone Thursday with the European Union’s internal affairs commissioner, Ylva Johansson, about the migrant situation, in effect acknowledging that the current approach wasn’t working.

“We agreed on the need to develop a new European operative strategy against human traffickers,” Piantedosi said in a statement released by his office. “I underlined to the commissioner the need to beef up repatriations by Tunisia toward the [migrants’] countries of origins.”

A bilateral meeting in Brussels is planned soon, the statement said.

Italy has a repatriation agreement with Tunisia to send back Tunisians found ineligible for asylum, but not with most of the other countries whose migrants come ashore in Italy.

According to the Interior Ministry, nearly 126,000 migrants have reached Italy by sea this year as of Thursday morning, nearly double the number for the same time last year. On Thursday, an additional 180 migrants rescued at sea were brought to the port city of Salerno, south of Naples.

Separately, a group of EU lawmakers criticized Tunisian authorities Thursday after they were denied entry into the country for a visit aimed at better understanding a migration-focused agreement Tunis signed with the bloc. They called the refusal “unprecedented since [Tunisia’s] democratic revolution in 2011.”

Tunisia has become the main steppingstone to Italy this year, replacing Libya, where widespread abuse of migrants was reported. The port city of Sfax is a central launching point for Africans who hope to make the risky Mediterranean Sea crossing.

The visit by the cross-party EU delegation was planned as a follow-up to an April 2022 trip that was made amid concerns about democratic backsliding in Tunisia. The lawmakers from Germany and France planned to be in Tunisia on Sept. 14-16 with a goal of promoting dialogue among Tunisia’s political parties.

The lawmakers warned that “the dire economic and social situation in Tunisia, further aggravated by the humanitarian crisis, urgently requires a comprehensive national dialogue, without which the prospects for stable political and economic development in Tunisia remain bleak.”

Italy saw the highest number of sea arrivals in 2016, when some 181,400 migrants arrived, according to figures from the United Nations migration agency.