The Syrians usually arrive with money, bearing broken lives in canvas bags, and are able to slip out of Italy, bound for affluent northern Europe. The Eritreans may be far less wealthy but they too are well organized, with networks that move them north as well.Then there are men like Agyemin Boateng and Prince Adawiah, who were scooped out of the Mediterranean this month by an Italian rescue ship. Both are from Ghana, and neither has a plan for a new life in Europe — nor, they say, did either of them ever plan to come to Italy. They were working as laborers in Libya, until life there became untenable and returning to Ghana became unfeasible."There are guns and bombs," said Mr. Adawiah, 25, who worked in Tripoli for nearly three years. "Every day, there is shooting. I'm afraid. That is why I traveled to Italy."Europe's migration crisis escalated sharply in April, with the coming of warmer weather to the Mediterranean. Many more smugglers' boats took to the sea, and a record number of migrants died attempting the crossing — more than 1,700 people so far in 2015, by some estimates.Conflicts in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia have shaped and reshaped Europe's migrant flows in recent years, with none more transformative to the Mediterranean smuggling trade than the civil war in Syria. And the tumult in Libya is changing the migration equation once again.Libyan lawlessness has allowed a haven for smugglers to operate along the country's coastline, but it has also unmoored many African laborers who were working there as migrants. Many of these men now languish in Italian detention centers without contacts or plans for the future, and their growing numbers are frustrating some Italian mayors and other officials."We don't know anything," said one migrant, Shamsudeen Sawud, 18, who arrived in Italy more than a week ago. "No one is telling us anything."
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