Palermo-based coast guard official Claudia Viccica has said that in less than 24 hours since Saturday night 16 boats had arrived. The Tunisians are fleeing confusion following street protests and the ouster of the longtime president.

Many were kept in a fenced-in soccer field Sunday on Lampedusa island until ferries could take them to the mainland for document checks. Those ineligible for asylum risk deportation.

Viccica said during the night alone 10 boats arrived.

Authorities rushed to reopen a Lampedusa detention center that had been closed as the Italian government cracked down on illegal migration. The immigrants said they were fleeing poverty and continued unrest in the North African state in the wake of an uprising last month that ousted veteran ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali after 23 years in power.

“We are afraid. The revolution in January has changed nothing, absolutely nothing. We want to find a job in Europe. We are asking the Italian people for help,” said one man, interviewed by news channel SkyTG24.

Another man said: “There’s no work there. None of my family can work.” The authorities in Lampedusa, which usually has just 6,000 residents, are swamped. Some immigrants have been put up in local hotels and officials on Sunday re-opened an immigrant detention center that had been shut down.

Around 1,500 immigrants — almost all men — have been sleeping in the open.

Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, a member of the anti-immigration Northern League party, said: “The Tunisian system is collapsing. I will ask Tunisia’s foreign minister for authorization for our forces to intervene in Tunisia to block the flux,” he said in a television interview.

“Europe is not doing anything.... As usual we’re on our own,” he said.

Tunisian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abderraouf Ounaies, who was expected to visit Italy on Thursday, resigned abruptly on Sunday in a separate development.

The EU’s foreign policy chief is also set to visit Tunisia on Monday.

“I have asked for urgent intervention by the European Union because the Maghreb is exploding,” Maroni said, referring to the North Africa region.

“It’s out of control,” Lampedusa mayor Bernardino De Rubeis told reporters as boats continued to arrive on the tiny island, which at just 110 km from Tunisian shores is closer to North Africa than to Italy.

“There are people seeking political asylum but there are also people fleeing poverty and the strikes that have hit production,” said Federico Fossi, a spokesman in Rome for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

“The situation is becoming quite critical. More has to be done,” he said.

UNHCR has called for immigrants to be housed and fed and has said those that want to make a formal request for asylum should be able to do so.

Italy has begun airlifting and shipping many of the immigrants from Lampedusa to detention centers in Sicily and on mainland Italy, but police estimate that more than 2,000 of them remain on the island.

“The situation is very difficult,” the harbor master, Antonio Morana, told reporters. He said 977 people had landed so far on Sunday and more were coming.

Italy’s cabinet on Saturday declared a humanitarian emergency in the area.

A government statement said that the decision to call an official emergency would enable civil protection officers “to take immediate action needed to control this phenomenon and assist citizens who have fled from North Africa.”

In comments to the Corriere della Sera daily on Sunday, Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said: “We have to mobilise Mediterranean countries that have boats, planes and helicopters” to patrol the Tunisian coastline.

Frattini and Maroni appealed for immediate assistance from the European Union’s Warsaw-based border security agency, Frontex.

Maroni said that immigrants were fleeing poverty but that there were also escaped convicts and “figures from terrorist organizations” among them.

A young Tunisian migrant, meanwhile, drowned and another was reported missing when a boat carrying 12 people sank on Saturday off southeast Tunisia en route to Europe, the official Tunisian TAP agency said.