Europe New Immigrants

In the last five years Europe has ecxperienced a surge in asylum seekers risking their lives to escape war, political, religious and racial persecution. Since 1994 more than 7000 people, including women and children, who have taken this harrowing journey by sea departing from Lybia have died in the Strait of Sicily. Since the introduction of the Italian Navy operation “Mare Nostrum” (Our Sea) in October 2013, more than 130.000 people have been rescued and have landed in the Southern regions of Italy. The new wave of under-age asylum seekers escaping from Syria, Eritrea, Mali, Gambia, Egypt and Bangladesh are vulnureable youths lost in limbo, with no acess to education and basic services, victims of the Dublin III regualtion, and of the slow Italian bureaucratic system.