Frontex, the agency tasked with protecting the European Union’s land and sea borders, has reported a drastic uptick in illegal migrant entries, saying that the number of foreigners who’ve managed to illegally enter the bloc has increased by 61 percent year over year.
While speaking at a hearing before the E.U.’s Schengen Parliamentary Committee last week, Frontex Executive Director Fabrice Leggeri told policymakers that 2021 has seen at least 134,000 illegal immigrants enter the bloc – a massive increase from last year, the Italian newspaper Il Giornale reports.
Leggeri also noted that the problem is especially severe in Italy, reporting that the number of migrants who’ve illegally entered the Mediterranean country this year has almost doubled from last year.
“In 2021, 134,000 foreigners entered the EU clandestinely, 68 percent more than in 2020,” Leggeri said, adding that the most significant uptick of illegal arrivals had taken place along the bloc’s southern Mediterranean flank.
“In the central Mediterranean, which particularly affects Italy, we saw an 87 percent increase in landings since the beginning of the year,” he said. “Arrivals from Libya and Tunisia have doubled. We’ve recorded 48,000 illegal entries.”
The European Union’s eastern flank is under considerable stress as well.
As Big League Politics reported last month, Polish President Andrzej Duda, one of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s closest allies in Europe, was forced to declare a state of emergency as the Belarusian president allowed thousands of migrants from the third world to travel westward unimpeded.
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