Two thousand African migrants have been retrieved from the Mediterranean Sea and brought to Italy in the span of 48 hours, local media reports.
The Italian Navy and Coast Guard conducted joint operations alongside NGOs Doctors Without Borders and SOS Mediterranée as they assisted crowds of incoming migrants to complete their journey to Europe, eventually depositing most of them on the island of Sicily.
Many of the new arrivals launched from Tunisia, indicating that human traffickers have discovered a replacement for Libya, a route which has been stifled since Italy began involving itself in stemming the tide at its source.
“The news is not the number of landfalls, but that the origin is from Libya and Tunisia where, in the last few days, the axis of the departures seems to have shifted,” TGLA7 reports. “Two thousand people have been gathered by SOS Mediterranée in the last two days. And in Sicily, in recent hours, 300 people have landed in the port of Catania, while another 700 arrived yesterday in Augusta, in the province of Syracuse. Tomorrow in Palermo there would be 600 people rescued in the canel of Sicily, aboard the Spanish military ship Numancia.”
Italy is reeling from an unending flow of African migrants, as over 600,000 have crossed since 2015, turning port towns on the islands Sicily and Sardinia into open air asylum camps.
According to the United Nations refugee agency, a mere 2.7% of over 181,000 arrivals to Italy in 2017 were deemed genuine 'refugees' and granted asylum.
Italian voters have done their best to regain control of their spiraling nation, voting in populist-nationalist parties that vowed to deport 500,000 migrants if allowed to form a ruling coalition. However, the will of the people has thus far been thwarted by globalist elites, and new snap elections are looming.
“The markets will teach Italy to vote for the right thing,” EU budget commissioner Gunther Oettinger is reported to have said in response to political chaos unfolding in Italy. “I can only hope that this will play a role in the election campaign, in the sense of sending a signal to voters not to hand power to populists on the right and left.”
Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz recently proposed that EU border patrols should be extended into Africa to preempt migrants attempting to reach Europe - a move that Italians would likely support.
(PHOTO: ALESSANDRO FUCARINI/AFP/Getty Images)
