Far-right interior minister Matteo Salvini on Monday ruled out migrant identification 'hotspots' in Italy, saying these would fail to "stop the deadly flows" across the Mediterranean.
"Hotspots in Italy? These would be a problem for us and for Libya itself because the deadly flows would not be stopped," Salvini tweeted.
"We have proposed processing centres on Libya's southern borders to prevent bottlenecks forming in Tripoli, as occurs in Italy," the tweet added.
Salvini visited Tripoli on Monday, where he met his Libyan counterpart Abdulsalam Ashour and deputy prime minister Ahmed Matig.
The number of migrants making the perilous crossing to Italy from North Africa has plunged this year, according to the United Nations migration agency, the International Organisation for Migration.
A total of 40, 944 people reached Italy by boat this year through 20 June and 960 drowned, compared with 84,675 arrivals and 2,133 deaths over the same period of 2017, the IOM reported.
Nonetheless, the populist Italian government is eager for the burden of migrant arrivals to be lifted from front-line states and shared more fairly by European Union countries. It has proposed setting up migrant 'protection centres' in other EU countries and extending the EU borders and coastguard agency Frontex's remit to African soil.
Rome also wants to overhaul current EU immigration rules that force migrants to register and apply for asylum in the first European country they reach and require that country to process their claim.
