(AP) The number of people trying to enter Europe without authorization has risen significantly this year to surpass migrant border crossing figures from 2019, before restrictions imposed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic severely limited travel, the European Union’s border and coast guard said Tuesday.
Frontex said in a statement that 160,000 “illegal border crossings” were recorded in the first 10 months of this year, up 70% compared to the same period in 2020 and 45% more than in 2019. The biggest rise was at the EU’s eastern borders, in the Balkans region and via central Mediterranean Sea crossings.
Almost 8,000 people — most of them Iraqis, Afghans and Syrians — entered through the EU’s eastern frontier; a 15-fold increase over 2020, the agency said. Crossings from Belarus hit a peak of more than 3,200 in July, but had dropped to over 600 by October.
