Europe’s Open Back Door: Italian Migration Up 50% in 2023
4th January 2024
Despite promises to reduce illegal migration and attempts at negotiating deals with countries outside of the European Union to curb migration flows, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s first full year as the head of the Italian government has been marked by failure.
The Italian interior ministry announced that in 2023 a total of 155,754 illegal migrants had arrived in Italy, up from 103,846 in 2022, an increase of nearly 50%, according to a report from the European Union-funded website InfoMigrants.
For Meloni, the numbers are representative of the biggest failure of her government so far. She had campaigned hard on reducing illegal immigration prior to the 2022 election that saw her party, the national-conservative Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), shock the world and place first, ensuring her premiership in a right-wing coalition government.