1,000 migrants reach Italy on rickety boats

More than 1,000 migrants have arrived in Sicily aboard rickety boats in the past 24 hours, after braving the dangerous voyage from Africa in search of work in the European Union, Italian officials said on Tuesday.

Many thousands of migrants try to reach the southern shores of Italy every summer, when Mediterranean waters are sufficiently calm for small boats to make the crossing.

The migrants, from all over Africa, usually embark in Libya or Tunisia in an exodus increased by political turmoil in North Africa, the Syrian civil war and now bloody strife in Egypt, Reuters reports.

Some 325 migrants, among them 64 women and four children, were sighted on Tuesday morning on a fishing boat off the coast of Porto Empedocle on Sicily’s southern coast. They were transferred to coastguard boats and taken to shore, police said.

Another 230 were brought ashore after they were intercepted off the coast of the island of Lampedusa, Italy’s most southern point, while a group of about 110 reached the shores of Siracusa, in Sicily. Tuesday’s arrivals followed those of some 400 migrants on Monday afternoon.

The flood of migrants is drawn by the prospect of finding work in the European Union

and many do not remain in Italy. Those who do, or who are taken into Italian

custody, can be sent home unless they prove they are political refugees.

Some of the migrants who arrived on Tuesday said they were from Syria, where a civil

war has been raging for two years.