Fifteen boats packed with hundreds of migrants landed on the southern Italian island of Lampedusa on Sunday (May 9), and officials said they were expecting numbers to increase as the weather improved.
More than 1,400 people got off the vessels at the Mediterranean island, one of the main landing points for people trying to get into Europe, ANSA news agency said.
Lampedusa’s mayor Toto Martello told state broadcaster RAI that migrants arrivals are resuming alongside good weather and discussions about the immigration issue need to be restarted.
Around 11,000 migrants disembarked on Italy’s coasts from the start of 2021 to May 7, up from 4,105 in the same period last year, interior ministry data shows.
Overall numbers are still down from 2015, when hundreds of thousands of migrants made the perilous sea crossing to Europe, many of them fleeing poverty and conflict across Africa and the Middle East.
(Reuters)
