Italy is facing a surge of migration across the Mediterranean

THE encampment has no name, no water, no electricity and no right to be where it is: an abandoned bus park in a desolate stretch of scrub, east of the Tiburtina railway station in Rome. Most of the Africans dotted across the asphalt in tents or sprawled on mattresses in the enervating heat of a Roman summer have no permission to be there either. Many come straight off the boat, says Andrea Costa, head of Baobab Experience, the NGO running the camp: “For them, this is just the latest stage in a journey that may already have taken two years.”

So far this year, the number of migrants arriving in Italy by sea is up by 17% over the same period in 2016, to 93,335. Unlike the Syrians who poured across the Aegean in 2015, most of them are fleeing not from war or persecution, but for economic reasons. They do not qualify for humanitarian protection, and in most cases do not want to remain in Italy, but to move on to countries with better grey-market jobs.