Migrant crisis? The Italian hotspot approach is not a solution, but it has been politically effective

Alessio D'angelo - MA Migration, Society and Policy Programme Leader Dr Alessio D’Angelo is a member of the Middlesex team working on ‘EVI-MED – Constructing an Evidence Base of Mediterranean Migrations’, an ESRC-DFID project. In his latest blog post, he reports from Sicily where the ‘hotspot approach’ has dramatically altered the landscape of Italy’s migrant crisis.

Over the last few months the so-called migrant crisis in the Mediterranean has been described in terms of ‘chaos’. These or related terms have been used with particular regard to the situation in Greece, which – according to the official statistics – saw nearly one million sea arrivals between January 2015 and January 2016. The ‘chaos’, however, is not in the numbers.