There's been another surge of illegal aliens flooding into Italy and the Italian government simply can't handle any more.

More than 12,000 people from Africa and the Middle East have crossed the Mediterranean to Italy in just the last 4 days and the unseaworthy, overloaded boats that make the journey are taxing the Italian navy and coast guard to the limit.

But Italy risks severe penalties from the EU for turning away the migrants.

Daily Caller:

“Setting off such high numbers of boats at the same time is extremely worrying,” EU border security official Fabrice Leggeri said in a statement.

“With this frequency and these numbers we can easily tell that, soon enough, we won’t be able to handle it any longer,” an Italian lawmaker told WaPo. “We risk reaching a point when we won’t be able to authorize any landing any longer, a dramatic situation.”

EU officials have pledged nearly 200 million U.S. dollars to Libya’s coastguard in an effort to counter migrant efforts. EU officials also reportedly hope that the Libyan government will be able to stop migrant smuggling networks on the ground in order to curb the flow, but little appears to be working in the near term.

If Italy shuts down its borders to the arrival of sea-borne migrants, it is likely to face heavy pushback from the the broader EU. The bloc sued member states Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic for refusing to accept the allotted number of refugee’s under an EU wide resettlement program. The action was initiated in the European Court of Justice and will likely impose a heavy fine on the three affected countries.

As Soren Kern points out, those Central and Eastern EU countries have stood up to Germany and said they will not abide by the resettlement agreement stuffed down their throats by Berlin. They claim the right to maintain their national character by limiting the number of foreigners who enter their countries.

The so-called infringement procedure, which authorizes the European Commission, the powerful executive arm of the European Union, to sue member states that are considered to be in breach of their obligations under EU law, could lead to massive financial penalties.

The dispute dates back to September 2015, when, at the height of Europe's migration crisis, EU member states narrowly voted to relocate 120,000 "refugees" from Italy and Greece to other parts of the bloc. This number was in addition to a July 2015 plan to redistribute 40,000 migrants from Italy and Greece.

Of the 160,000 migrants to be "shared," nine countries in Central and Eastern Europe were ordered to take in around 15,000 migrants. Although the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia voted against the agreement, they were still required to comply.

Since then, several Central European EU member states have vehemently refused to accept their assigned quotas of migrants. Poland, for example, has a quota of 6,182 migrants, not one of whom has been admitted. The Czech Republic has a quota of 2,691 migrants, of whom only 12 have been taken. Hungary has a quota of 1,294, none of whom have been admitted.

In the EU as a whole, so far only around 20,000 migrants have been relocated (6,896 from Italy and 13,973 from Greece), according to the EU's latest relocation and resettlement report, published on June 13, 2017. Of the 28 EU member states, only Malta has taken in its full quota — 131 migrants.

Many so-called asylum seekers have refused to relocate to Central and Eastern Europe because the financial benefits there are not as generous as in France, Germany or Scandinavia. In addition, hundreds of migrants who have been relocated to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which rank among the poorest countries in the EU, have since fled to Germany and other wealthier countries in the bloc.

Meanwhile, the enforcers of European "unity" have sought to shame the Central European holdouts into compliance by appealing to nebulous concepts such as European "values" and "solidarity." 

No wonder the EU is falling apart.

If Italy follows the lead of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in halting the flow of refugees, the burden will almost certainly fall on Greece, who already have their hands full with their own refugee crisis. Given the massive problems with the Greek economy, there is no way for them to physically care for and resettle tens of thousands of new migrants.

Elections in Europe have shown that the ordinary voter is fed up with the open door policies of Germany, France, and the Scandanavian countries and fear that the richer, more powerful nations will insist that the rest of the EU solve their migrant problems for them by forcing them to accept foreigners in numbers they simply can't handle. The European press has been fairly successful in demonizing those who wish to keep control of their borders by calling them "nationalists" and "extreme right." But even Chancellor Merkel of Germany has been forced to modify her immigration policies, indicating that hundreds of thousands of refugees will be sent back home. That policy took the wind out of the nationalist's sails and will probable assure her re-election.

But there are still millions of people in Africa and the Middle East waiting to make the dangerous crossing for a chance at a western style life with all the government benefits that entails.

Eventually, even Germany will have to close the door.