To reduce tension between itself and other EU members who claim unregistered migrants travel through their countries, Italy is planning to fingerprint migrants at sea as soon as they reach Mediterranean rescue boats. This move essentially creates fingerprinting hotspots at sea to process migrants, but this can be problematic, as the migrants are often traumatized and want to seek asylum elsewhere in Europe. The European Commission has charged Italy with finding a better way to process and register the more than 350,000 migrants who have entered the country since 2014.

A partial reason for the advent of fingerprinting at sea is because Italy is now faced with asylum-seeking people from Austria as it plans to close its borders. Italy plans to start naval patrols off the coast of Libya to prevent smuggling, which will help deal with a number of migrants they must process in the summer. Other than the at-sea fingerprinting locations, Italy plans to incentivize African countries to fast-track the readmission of migrants with no claim to European asylum.