Migration to Italy via the Mediterranean, in recent years the biggest gateway to Europe for those fleeing war or poverty in Africa and Asia, has nearly ground to a halt, showing the effectiveness of controversial efforts by European authorities to stem the inflow.

In the first two months of this year, 262 seaborne migrants reached Italy, compared with 5,200 in the same period last year and more than 13,000 in 2017.

Rome and the European Union have tried hard to shut down the Libya-to-Italy route, clamping down on nongovernmental organization ships that rescue migrants at sea, training and supplying Libya’s coast guard, and funding authorities in Libya, Niger and Sudan to help block the migration trail.

Matteo Salvini, Italy’s dominant politician and head of the anti-immigration League party, has seized headlines by not letting some migrants disembark from rescue ships in Italian ports, and is claiming credit for the huge drop in arrivals. His hard-line tactics, including in one case keeping 177 migrants docked on a ship for five days, have prompted prosecutors to investigate him for allegedly kidnapping migrants.

“There is still a lot to do, but numbers speak clearly. From words to facts,” Mr. Salvini, the interior minister and deputy prime minister since last June, tweeted recently.


Heavy migration via the Libya route powered the rise of Mr. Salvini’s nativist party, which took power in mid-2018 in a partnership with the populist 5 Star Movement. Yet the sharp drop in numbers is largely due to measures under Italy’s previous, center-left government.

That administration teamed up with EU authorities to impede the migrant trail through Libya. Rome and Brussels have spent more than €90 million ($101.1 million) since 2017 on funding Libyan border controls, including its coast guard, which received new patrol boats and training.

Since 2016—when seaborne arrivals in Italy peaked at some 180,000—the EU has granted some €230 million to Niger, the main southern gateway to Libya. By last year, the northbound flow through Niger had dropped by at least 75% from an estimated 330,000 people in 2016, according to the International Organization for Migration. Sudan has also received some €100 million since 2016 from Brussels to curb the migration trail.

Libya, which plunged into turmoil after the fall of Moammar Gadhafi in a popular uprising backed by NATO airstrikes in 2011, is split between two rival governments and a complex web of rival armed groups, complicating efforts to tackle migration.


In 2017, Italy struck an agreement with tribes that controlled swaths of Libya’s southern borders, under which tribal elders agreed to join forces to stop migrants and people smugglers. Italy said it offered development aid to help turn local communities away from the smuggling trade, though how much couldn’t be determined. “Good money pushes out bad money, as people used to say,” said Marco Minniti, Mr. Salvini’s predecessor as interior minister.

In recent months, a push into southern Libya by forces loyal to military strongman Khalifa Haftar has disrupted the traditional route with fighting, contributing to a drop in migration toward the coast, according to Jérôme Tubiana, a migration researcher and adviser to Doctors Without Borders.

The number of migrants on the Libya-Italy route plunged in the summer of 2017 from the year before, by 50% in July and 80% in August, leading NGOs to speculate that Italy was funding militias that controlled crucial parts of the Libyan coast. The government at the time denied funding the militias.

A spokesman for Mr. Salvini said that Italy’s current government deals only with Libya’s U.N.-backed government, not with militias or tribes.


Analysts say the distinction can be blurry. “Libya is absolute chaos, with several actors playing a role in controlling territory. It’s all very murky,” said Matteo Villa, a researcher on Mediterranean migration at foreign-affairs think tank ISPI in Milan.

The number of seaborne migrants arriving in Italy had already dropped by 80% when the new government took power.

Mr. Salvini helped deliver the coup de grace. Last summer, he repeatedly closed Italian ports to aid groups’ vessels ferrying rescued migrants. Nongovernmental organizations mostly stopped their rescue missions at sea. Some had already ceased operations after refusing to abide by obligations imposed by the previous Italian government.

Meanwhile, Libya’s coast guard, equipped and trained by Rome and the EU, stepped up the interception of migrants leaving the country in small boats provided by smugglers. In the second half of 2018, the coast guard brought 85% of all migrants who took to the sea back to shore, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Among the few who made it to Italy in recent months, many say they attempted the crossing several times before succeeding, according to aid groups.


“There has been a de facto pushback of migrants,” said Federico Soda, a senior IOM official.

Smugglers have also changed their habits, even their whole business model, say researchers. Instead of organizing migrants’ journey to Italy, some now try to make money by holding migrants captive and releasing them only after further payment.

Smugglers offering a passage to Italy have become harder to find on social media. Gabriele Baratto, a researcher at the University of Trento in Italy, said it was easy until recently to find them on Facebook. But in late January, it took his team two days to find a single Libyan smuggler.

Many migrants are turning back south, with help from international organizations. The IOM has helped 37,500 migrants return to their home country from Libya and 23,500 from Niger since 2017. Of those, 1,700 were repatriated from Libya this year, or more than six times the number who reached Italy. The UNHCR has also evacuated more than 3,000 migrants from Libya since late 2017, primarily to Niger.

Overall, the number of arrivals in Europe has fallen sharply, but the near-closure of the Libya route has also diverted migrants westward, toward Morocco, from where they try to reach Spain. Last year, 65,000 migrants reached Spain, almost double the number who reached Italy. In January and February of this year, Spain received some 5,700 migrants, more than 20 times Italy’s intake.

Mr. Baratto says Moroccan smugglers’ ads on Facebook are now fairly common, whereas they were barely present on social media until a year ago.

Messages from migrants are also appearing on social media, discouraging others from trying to enter Libya.

“I urge all Egyptians not to cross illegally,” says an Egyptian man who appears in a video posted on Facebook in September, sitting in the sand with others detained by Libyan border guards. “Otherwise you’ll go through what we went through. Three days in the desert without food or drink.”

—Amira El-Fekki in Cairo contributed to this article.

Write to Giovanni Legorano at giovanni.legorano@wsj.com and Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com