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00:00 arriving one after the other.
00:02 Dinghy boats form a steady line as they approach the coast of Lampedusa,
00:07 after a journey across the Mediterranean Sea.
00:10 The island is the first port of call for many people fleeing from northern Africa,
00:16 as they attempt to make their way further into Europe.
00:19 But the tiny isle is overwhelmed by recent arrivals.
00:24 Over the course of 24 hours, around 6,800 migrants disembarked from 120 boats.
00:31 That's a few hundred people more than Lampedusa's full-time population.
00:36 We had a big increase of the arrivals of migrants this summer.
00:41 We are more or less with the numbers we had in 2016, which was an exceptional year.
00:48 What seems to be a bit different is that now we do have a different government,
00:54 more right-wing, more anti-migration.
00:59 Giorgia Maloney had made curbing immigration a centrepiece of her election campaign one year ago,
01:06 previously calling for a physical blockade to prevent boats from leaving African shores.
01:13 And as migrants head further north into Europe,
01:16 leaders are pressuring Maloney to respect EU asylum rules.
01:20 Germany says it will no longer voluntarily accept refugees coming from Italy.
01:25 Out of over 12,400 takeover requests to Italy this year, 10 transfers have taken place.
01:33 So for now, we will no longer be sending our teams to Italy to conduct interviews.
01:38 Italian authorities say its reception centres are overcrowded,
01:42 and that part of the reason for the increase was a bottleneck in Tunisia's ports,
01:47 where smugglers were prevented from launching boats for several days because of the rough seas.
01:52 For now, in an attempt to ease overcrowding, hundreds of migrants are being transferred to Sicily.
01:59 (audience laughing)