It took Samuel Agustin more than a month to reach Tripoli from his home in the West African country of Benin, traveling by taxi and trudging hundreds of kilometers across the Sahara in blistering heat. That, he says, was the easy part. Since that journey three years ago, the 24-year-old former sociology student has been trying to find a way out of the Libyan capital. "We came here just to look for jobs," Agustin told Time last week on a crowded downtown sidewalk, where he washes cars for small change. "Now, since we don't have work, we don't have money. Without money, we cannot get to Europe. It's easy to get into Libya; it's hard to get out."

Getting out of Libya — and Africa as a whole — could get harder still. More than 11,000 illegal African immigrants have arrived in Sicily so far this year. The vast majority set off from the Libyan ports of Zlitan and Zuwarah, and land on the tiny Sicilian island of Lampedusa, just 120 km from the north African coast. Almost 1,800 arrived there just last week. But each year hundreds die in attempted crossings when their rickety fishing boats sink in the Mediterranean swells. Italy has begun an unprecedented crackdown on the new arrivals, who have become a hot political issue for Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. In the past, immigrants were typically given up to 60 days while the government checked their identities and assessed their status; now, most are flown back to Tripoli after a brief medical check. "It's quite scary," says opposition Senator Tana de Zulueta, who was in Lampedusa last week. "There is no access to even minimal standards of identification." Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu defended the measures, saying: "These are unwelcome decisions, but are nonetheless absolutely necessary to block a real organized assault on our coast."

Time got a rare look last week at the conditions in which some of Libya's would-be immigrants find themselves. In Tripoli's El-Fellah neighborhood, several hundred Ghanaians and Nigerians sleep in tents in a walled-off transit camp topped with coils of barbed wire and guarded by Libyan police. Although a police guard bolted the gate when Time walked toward it, migrants outside said the camp was overflowing. People are waiting for a flight, not to Europe, but back home. "Our embassies told us that Libya doesn't want us here," said 32-year-old Ati Moses from Ghana, squatting on his locked suitcase. "They will arrest us and deport us if we don't leave."

Berlusconi joined Libya's ruler Muammar Gaddafi in Zuwarah last week to attend the opening of a natural-gas pipeline linking the two countries, a joint project by the Italian oil company ENI and Libya's state oil producer NOC. Both men praised the prospect of Libyan natural gas flowing to Italy, but it could prove difficult to stop the unwelcome flow of immigrants. Officials in this oil-rich state admit they are not sad to see desperately poor Africans set course for Europe. And if Europeans really want to stop illegal immigration, they argue, they should invest billions in Africa to convince Africans that they have viable economic opportunities at home. Instead, they estimate that more than 1 million Africans now crowd Libya's cities, creating a jarring subculture in a Muslim country of fewer than 6 million. "Geography has not been kind to us," says Libyan Prime Minister Shukri Ghanem. "We're squeezed between the very poor and the very rich. The very rich show their wealth on television, so the very poor look at it and want to get there. To them, it looks like heaven on earth."

But in Libya, the reality is far from paradise. While most Africans describe the Libyans as cordial, some say they've been cursed at and pelted with stones. And many Africans in and around the El-Fellah camp have given up on making it to Europe. "We're fed up," says one Ghanaian man outside the camp. "If we can't go to Europe, we might as well go home." Libyan officials have begun gathering illegal immigrants at these transit points to save them from "dying in their quest," says Ghanem, an American-educated economist. In Rome, the aid organization Doctors Without Borders worries about conditions in the camps and condemns the new Italian policy, charging that genuine refugees could be turned back along with economic migrants. The critics say that for those who do make it — however briefly — to European shores, the new rapid Italian airlift puts them back into Libyan hands without any guarantees for their rights and well-being. "This is a very cynical and politically motivated shortcut that is not only illegal but violates fundamental respect for human beings," says Loris De Filippi, head of the Italian branch of Doctors Without Borders. "If this policy is the future, we need to know what's happening in Libya."

Despite the crackdown, Africans on the streets of Tripoli display little fear of arrest. Hundreds of migrants roam the city looking for work in the dazzling sun. Agustin, the student from Benin, washes cars about 100 m from the Prime Minister's office, on a block closely watched by security officials. A few kilometers away, Egyptians squat on the sidewalk on a busy street near the seafront, looking for odd jobs. Out in the western neighborhood of Saraj last Thursday, six Sudanese friends stood on a street corner for hours after hearing rumors that a British company had opened for business nearby. "I've been here three months and I've had no work," said Mohammed Ibrahim, who traveled by bus from southern Sudan last July. "I would like to go on to Europe, but I don't have the money."

In Tripoli's walled old city, Alou Mahamadou, 30, sat idle in a chair on the sidewalk last Thursday, nine months after arriving from Niger. He had tried for months to earn boat fare to Europe,

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) while also sending regular payments home to support his two infant boys. Now his European dream is fading. "The routes seem too dangerous now, and they make you pay too much," he says.

The smuggling trade may be one of Libya's most profitable homegrown industries, with boat fares to Lampedusa ranging from $900 to $1,900 per person. Late last week, a group of illegal Africans hunkered down in safe houses near Zuwarah, waiting for smugglers to assign them to boats to Italy, according to one resident with connections to the trafficking business. He described the operation to Time, sitting in the backroom of a Tripoli store. "It's a very well-organized system," he said, adding that one full boat can earn smugglers about $24,000. "When the weather is good, the boats go every night."

To try to intercept those boats, Italian police began joint patrols on the Mediterranean earlier this month with Spanish, Portuguese, British, Maltese and Slovene officers. And now that the E.U. has agreed in principle to lift its almost two-decades-old arms embargo against Libya, the Libyans plan to acquire new jeeps, helicopters and boats of their own to beef up the country's coastal security. But as long as Africans believe their only hope of a better life lies in Europe, people like Samuel Agustin will try to make the desperate journey.

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