People are crossing the Mediterranean to Italy in numbers not seen in years. And the more people who try – the more people risk dying. 30 people drowned when a migrant boat capsized this weekend, in international waters off Libya. Now there are many indications that 2023 could be another gloomy record year. The bodies continue to float ashore in the small community of Cutro, even though it has been over two weeks since the wooden boat “Summer Love” sank just outside Calabria. The death toll of 79 people, of which 24 are children under the age of twelve, is expected to reach three figures before the search for the dead can end. This weekend there was another accident. A boat with 47 migrants on board sank on the way from Libya to Italy – the deadliest route in the world. As the apportionment of blame continues — international aid agencies blame the sinking on Italian authorities, who in turn blame Russian mercenaries and the Libyan and Maltese coast guards — another question looms: is Europe facing another migrant crisis similar to the one in 2015? Italian reception on the breaking point There are some indications of that. The reception center on the island of Lampedusa sounded the alarm on Monday: 2,400 migrants in a place with room for only 400. There is a lack of food, water, blankets and small children are said to be sleeping under the open sky. So far this year, over 20,000 migrants have arrived in Italy by water, compared to around 6,000 at the same time last year, and 2022 was still the highest number since 2017. Just last weekend, as many migrants arrived in Italy (around 1,300) as during all of March 2022. The pandemic is over – then the life-threatening boat journeys will increase On Monday, around a hundred of the migrants from Lampedusa were redistributed to other places in Italy. They were lucky to survive the life-threatening journey. The only problem is that the boats continue to leave Libya – and the increasingly authoritarian Tunisia. According to Italian authorities, there are, in Libya alone, 685,000 migrants who may be ready to board the next boat. The Swedish Migration Agency recently wrote down the forecast for the number of people who are expected to seek asylum in Sweden in 2023 and 2024. The question is whether that figure will need to be revised during the year that passes.
t4-general
2023 could be a bleak record year
