One thing must be said right away: the number of new arrivals in the past year is unprecedented.

And in fact many of these people came - and they come - from states that can not be defined as such: where the possibility of drowning at sea unless scares remain.
Despite its location in the center of the Mediterranean, Italy is not the only European country to receive asylum requests, indeed.
Even going back to 2008, however, our country has never been one that has received more: at times it happened to the UK and Sweden, more often in France and Germany.
But things should be put in perspective: it is one thing to have a few tens of thousands of applications for asylum in a country like Italy - with its 60 million inhabitants -, another is whether the same people take refuge in Sweden or Austria, with the total population does not even reach 10 million.
We discover that just as Sweden is by far the place with the largest number of asylum requests, followed by Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway and Germany.
In Italy, in proportion, they will arrive slightly more than in France, but even so, our country remains far below.
Nor can we forget that these people represent a small slice of the total number of those who come from another country.
Here we no longer talk of tens of thousands, but of millions: Italy and even today remains one of the countries where there are fewer foreigners.
The author thanks Professor Giulio Zanella (University of Bologna) for the help during the research for this article.

From Wired