Italian Interior Minister Giuliano Amato has written to EU Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini to call for greater EU action on immigration. In the last few days more than 2,000 illegal immigrants have arrived in Lampedusa. An article in the Die Welt describes EU measures to cope with the immigration wave from North Africa as “insufficient”.

Meanwhile, Le Monde reports that there is political controversy over the number of illegal immigrants in Spain. The government puts it at 700,000 while the opposition are claiming it is more like 1.6 million. The European Union faces an urgent need for better migration statistics to support the development of a common EU migration policy. Once the EU Regulation on international migration and asylum statistics is in place, statistical data collection should be improved in terms of availability and reliability.

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