ROME (AP) — Italy's leader pressed his European Union allies Thursday to take in more migrants, saying the relentless arrival of tens of thousands of rescued migrants on Italian shores is putting his country under enormous strain. He spoke after 10,000 migrants were pulled to safety from the Mediterranean in the last few days alone.
With an election due in less than a year, political pressure is building on Italian Premier Paolo Gentiloni's center-left government to push for relief from fellow EU nations. Flanked by EU national leaders and EU officials at a news conference in Berlin, Gentiloni said the growing number of arrivals "puts our welcome capability to a tough test."
Italy has already taken in hundreds of thousands of migrants in the last few years. Some estimates say 220,000 migrants could land in Italy by the end of 2017. "It's a country under pressure, and we ask the help of our European allies," Gentiloni said, when asked about a reported new Italian strategy of blocking Italy's ports to non-Italian NGO ships that pluck to safety migrants from distressed dinghies and other unseaworthy boats off the Libyan coast.
While acknowledging that European nations take part in patrols to deter smuggling in the central Mediterranean, Gentiloni said the job of caring for the migrants "remains in one country only" — Italy.
In addition to those who arrive, over 2,000 migrants have died trying to cross the Mediterranean this year, according to the U.N. On Sunday, Italy's anti-migrant Northern League Party teamed up with the center-right opposition forces led by former Premier Silvio Berlusconi and triumphed in several mayoral races. The Democrats, Italy's main government party, took an embarrassing drubbing in the vote.
Many Italian towns say they just can't handle hosting hundreds of migrants any more. Right-wing parties remind citizens that Italians themselves are suffering from high unemployment and a practically flat economy.
In one port alone Thursday, in Reggio Calabria, 1,066 migrants disembarked from the Save the Children rescue ship Vos Hestia. Among them were 241 unaccompanied minors. From 2015 to 2016, the number of unaccompanied minors doubled to more than 25,000, according to the Interior Ministry.
This ship's rescued migrants came from Eritrea, Bangladesh, Somalia and several sub-Saharan nations of Africa and included a four-day-old boy. Six migrants had chicken pox and some 250 showed signs of scabies, so officials set up pressurized showers.
There's also concern that if Italy, a stalwart supporter of the EU, sours on Brussels because it feels abandoned on the migrant issue, the EU's very survival itself could be compromised. "Either the Union can shake itself up, or the fear is that it can collapse definitively," said Francesco Laforgia, a lawmaker in a leftist party that split recently from the Democrats.
The idea that Gentiloni's government is mulling blocking Italy's ports to European NGO ships, which increasingly rescue migrants before EU Frontex military fleets or Italian coast guard vessels arrive, is a dramatic recognition that public patience is wearing thin.
"The situation is no long sustainable," Nicola Latorre, head of the Senate's defense commission, told the Il Messaggero daily. "Obviously saving human lives remains a priority. But it's unthinkable that Italy does it all by itself."
Earlier Thursday, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini backed Italy's stance and insisted that other EU countries share the burden of caring for migrants. But previous plans hatched in Brussels to make other EU countries take in a fixed number of migrants from Italy and Greece have failed.
Several central and eastern European EU members — including large countries like Hungary and Poland — have flat out refused to take in a quota of the asylum-seekers, many of whom are economic migrants and not refugees from war or persecution.
Frances D'Emilio is on twitter at www.twitter.com/fdemilio
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