Migration across the Mediterranean
A country of emigrants becomes a country of immigrants and the main European landing point for boats from North Africa, with thousands drowned at sea.
- Missing Migrants Project: Mediterranean — International Organization for Migration, IOM
- Indicatori demografici – Anno 2024 — ISTAT, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (2025)
- Italy's Many Diasporas — Donna R. Gabaccia, UCL Press (2000)
From the 1970s Italy turned from a country of emigration into one of immigration, first from North Africa, the Philippines and former Yugoslavia, then Albania after 1991, and later Romania, Ukraine, China, South Asia and West Africa. ISTAT estimated about 5.4 million foreign residents at the start of 2025, roughly 9% of the population, not counting the many immigrants who have become citizens.
- Indicatori demografici – Anno 2024 — ISTAT, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (2025)
Its long coastline and the closeness of Lampedusa and Sicily to Libya and Tunisia made Italy the main destination on the central Mediterranean route. On 3 October 2013 a boat sank off Lampedusa and 368 people died; Italy launched the naval rescue operation Mare Nostrum, which ran for a year. Arrivals peaked in 2016 at around 180,000. The International Organization for Migration has recorded more than 20,000 dead and missing on the central Mediterranean since 2014, and says the real toll is higher.
- Missing Migrants Project: Mediterranean — International Organization for Migration, IOM
Italy cannot absorb unlimited arrivals, smugglers must be stopped, and other EU countries must share the burden. Many Italians support tougher border policies and agreements with Libya and Tunisia.
- Missing Migrants Project: Mediterranean — International Organization for Migration, IOM
- Italy — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
People fleeing war and poverty must be rescued and welcomed; Pope Francis's first trip outside Rome was to Lampedusa in 2013, where he condemned the "globalisation of indifference". Many Italians recall that their own grandparents were once the migrants.
- Italy's Many Diasporas — Donna R. Gabaccia, UCL Press (2000)
- Missing Migrants Project: Mediterranean — International Organization for Migration, IOM
Why it matters today
About one in eleven residents of Italy is a foreign citizen, and Lampedusa has become a symbol both of European solidarity and of its failures. Many Italians feel left alone by the EU to manage arrivals; many others, including Catholic groups and rescuers, see a moral duty to save lives. Migration is one of the questions that most divides Italian politics.