Excerpt:
Italy doubled down Friday on its new tough stance against migrants, insisting it could not take “one more” refugee and warned the migration crisis could put the bloc’s survival at stake.
Just two days before a mini summit on the issue in Brussels, Italy’s three-week-old populist government dug its heels in on campaign promises to stop the influx of migrants, threatening to seize rescue ships or barring them from its ports.
“We cannot take in one more person,” hardline Interior Minister Matteo Salvini told the German weekly Der Spiegel. “On the contrary: we want to send away a few.”
The far-right Salvini, who heads the anti-immigration League party and is also Italy’s deputy prime minister, has come to personify Rome’s new confrontational and unbending stance.