EU reports surge in illegal migration to shores

Saturday, May 31, 2014

LONDON -- The number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean to enter Europe illegally so far this year is close to the total for all of 2013 and is likely to rise as summer weather brings calmer seas, officials from the European Union's border agency reported Friday.

The assessment fed into a debate on immigration that has led to a surge among rightist parties in Britain, France and elsewhere.

The agency, Frontex, which is based in Warsaw, Poland, said in an annual report earlier this month that the number of asylum seekers arriving, mainly in Italy, from North Africa in 2013 was 40,000. Ewa Moncure, a spokesman for the agency, said Friday that unofficial figures for 2014 indicated that 37,000 migrants had already been detected crossing from Libya and Egypt.

"Looking ahead, everything points to a heightened likelihood of large numbers of illegal border-crossings into the EU and an increased number of migrants in need of assistance from search and rescue operations but also in terms of provision of international protection," the Frontex report said.

Overall in 2013, the number of people detected trying to enter the 28-nation European Union illegally rose to 107,000 in 2013 from 75,000 in 2012, the report said. Syrians, Afghans and Eritreans were "the most commonly detected nationalities," it added. It was not clear how many migrants had escaped detection.

With the civil war in their home country now in its fourth year, Syrians accounted for almost a quarter of all arrivals in 2013, "and at 25,500 was almost three times the 2012 figure," the report said. More than two-thirds of Syrians migrants wound up seeking asylum in Sweden, Germany or Bulgaria.

Apart from the central Mediterranean route, where migrants risk their lives in leaky, overcrowded vessels to reach Italy and Malta, there also had been a "sharp increase" across the border between Hungary, which is a member of the EU, and Serbia, which is not.

The figures emerged after a series of episodes illustrated both the determination of asylum seekers to reach Europe and the reluctance of some in Europe to accept them.

Earlier this week, French riot police dispersed hundreds of migrants at a makeshift camp in Calais on the same day more than 1,000 people tried to force their way over razor-wire barriers into Spain's North African enclave of Melilla. Last week alone, Italian authorities said, they had rescued almost 1,000 migrants off the coast of Sicily and the island of Lampedusa.

The episodes heightened concerns that the EU has become a draw for asylum seekers from far-flung lands, even as the bloc's wealthier nations attract economic migrants from its poorer members, Bulgaria and Romania in particular.

The immigration debate played a large part in elections for the European Parliament this month that boosted the political fortunes of the National Front in France and the U.K. Independence Party in Britain, both of which demand curbs on immigration.

A Section on 05/31/2014