Italy’s interior minister and leader of the right-wing League party Matteo Salvini has been talking a lot about illegal immigration. The new coalition government wants to deport half a million undocumented migrants currently living in Italy. Mr Salvini said on Twitter on 4 June “the landing and taking in of hundreds of thousands of ‘non-refugees’ cannot continue to be an exclusively Italian issue”.
He said he wants more help from the EU to deal with the flow of people. Italy has received a large number of migrants in recent years. About 120,000 arrived by sea in 2017 – double the number in Greece and Spain combined. But the number of arrivals in Italy has not been high only in recent years, but for at least a decade.
When the refugee crisis peaked in 2015, with more than a million arriving in the EU, all eyes were on Greece where more than 800,000 people arrived. In that same year, Italy received 154,000 people. In the 10 years before that peak, a total of more than 260,000 arrived in Italy, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
OnTheSpotNews 
Leave a comment