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

A woman and a child sleep outside the migrant reception center on Italy’s southernmost island of Lampedusa. 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. She said she would support a quota system for legal immigration “where necessary and 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. They called the refusal “unprecedented since democratic revolution in 2011.” Tunisia has become the main steppingstone to Italy this year, replacing Libya, where widespread abuse of migrants was reported. 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.