'Migrants should be dumped on North Africa's beaches with a packet of peanuts'

Rome: Migrants to Italy should be "dumped" back on the North African beaches they set sail from "with a pat on the back, a packet of peanuts and an ice cream," an anti-immigrant Italian politician said Thursday.

"Italy can't take in the whole of Africa," Northern League leader Matteo Salvini told Radio 24's 'La Zanzara talk-show.

"With all the immigrants arriving in Italy, there is a full-blown displacement of our population going on," he claimed.

Salvini attacked Italian Interior Ministry proposals to make all mayors take in fixed quotas of migrants and asylum-seekers, urging the ministry's top immigration official Mario Morcone to resign.

Morcone "should board the first migrant boat and be sent somewhere else in the Mediterranean," Salvini said.

Salvini also took aim at Ghanaian rapper Bel Figo, whose songs pillory Italy's treatment of migrants, saying: "I'd send him to pick cotton."-IANS