Hundreds of migrants scuffled with police and briefly blocked a major road in Italy’s financial capital Milan yesterday in a protest against their living conditions and their long wait for authorisation to seek work.

Chanting “documents, documents”, around 300 migrants held up traffic on a main route into the city, with riot police called in to push the men back into their near-by temporary camp, where they are awaiting registration and identity papers.

The protesters came primarily from Africa. “This home is not good, this home is not good!” one of the migrants shouted.

More than 100,000 migrants have reached Italy so far this year by sea, according to an Interior Ministry tally. While many of the newcomers seek to move swiftly to wealthier northern Europe, at least 85,000 are housed in Italian shelters, often hoping for tempor-ary documents that will let them seek work.

As in other European countries, the huge influx has created political tensions, with some opposition parties demanding a much more robust approach to tackling the migrants.

“What the hell! They are guests here who we are paying for and they are busting our b***s,” Matteo Salvini, the leader of the rightist Northern League party, wrote on his Facebook page after the Milan protest.

This home is not good!

“I would put them on the first plane and send them all home,” he added.

Salvini’s anti-immigration rhetoric has helped turn the League – a party traditionally rooted in the north – into Italy’s third most popular political party.

Meanwhile, according to Jean-Claude Juncker, the EU bloc’s chief executive, the European Union needs “collective courage” to confront the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean even if immigration issues are unpopular at home.

Juncker yesterday rejected suggestions of inaction in Brussels and insisted that while facing what the European Commission says is the worst refugee crisis since World War 2, European governments are bickering over how to deal with record numbers of migrants fleeing war and poverty and heading across Europe.

EU leaders have already agreed the outlines of a two-year plan to deal with unprecedented numbers of migrants from North Africa and the Middle East. But implementing the system to resettle or relocate 60,000 refugees is proving to be highly contentious at a time of rising anti-immigration parties in Europe.