Frontex chief warns of high migration via the Balkans

The director of Frontex, the European Union’s border agency, is warning that illegal migration into the EU through the Balkans is a growing cause of concern.

The migrants are coming from Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and central Asia and then trying to enter the EU through land and sea borders from Turkey.

His warning comes as the European Commission is about to launch two communications on Wednesday (13 February) setting out how to strengthen its borders to tackle illegal immigration.

Ilkka Laitinen, director of Frontex, said that, although the agency had had some success in reducing migration from west Africa to the Canary Islands, there were disturbing signs of more illegal migration along the Balkans route.

"The most, let’s say, concerning trend can be identified there. There has been, quite sharply, an increasing number of illegal immigrants both at the maritime borders in the Aegean Sea and at the land border between Turkey and Greece and Turkey and Bulgaria too," he said.

He described the number of arrests as "relatively high".

A Greek government spokesman said that there had been a big increase in illegal migration in the last two years. More than 95,000 illegal migrants were held during the first ten months of 2007, almost the same number as was recorded for the whole of 2006 - itself an increase of more than 40% on 2005 levels.

Greece’s Interior Minister Prokopis Pavlopoulos wrote to the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee last year asking for "major and sincere efforts" from the EU to help Athens deal with the problem, including progress on an agreement with Turkey to take migrants back.

Part of the attraction of the Balkan route might be that the EU’s Schengen zone of border-free travel was extended in December to nine more countries, including those in central Europe. "What is a very interesting question is how the extension of the Schengen area, how it would affect this phenomenon too, which would be considered one of the pull-factors to use different routes," Laitinen said.

The Commission will on Wednesday set out ideas for a ‘border surveillance system’ to link up member states’ systems to co-ordinate border management better.

Laitinen welcomed the Commission’s plan, also to be unveiled next week, to introduce an ‘entry-exit’ system to record people entering and leaving the Schengen zone - a system aimed at targeting people who over-stay their visas. He said Frontex could become involved in the new system by helping to co-ordinate checks at airports and land borders.

"One very big concern of ours is the ‘big unknown’ which are the over-stayers. It is something that we do not even dare to make an estimation of at the European level," Laitinen said.

The trends for other routes into the EU saw a decline in 2007 - including a 60% decrease from 2006, down from 31,678 to 12,478, in the number of migrants landing on Spain’s Canary Islands.

"It’s quite a decrease but on the other hand the bad news is, if we compare it to 2005 we are still in a high level. But the trend is promising and gives us the justification to carry on with the operations in that area," he added.

Laitinen said that there was also a "slightly decreasing trend" for the number of people arriving into the EU via the Mediterranean, including Malta and Italy.

Frontex is now conducting almost continuous joint patrols between EU member states in both the Atlantic and Mediterranean to target illegal migration.

The Commission will also publish on Wednesday an evaluation of Frontex and ideas for its future development. EU ministers are to discuss the ideas at a conference on 11-12 March.

The director of Frontex, the European Union’s border agency, is warning that illegal migration into the EU through the Balkans is a growing cause of concern.