The number of illegal border crossings in the Balkan region reached an unprecedented level of 2 million in 2015, the EU border agency Frontex said Friday.
“The numbers of non-regional migrants transiting the Balkans reached unprecedented and extraordinary levels during 2015 with over 2 million illegal border crossings reported by all the countries in the region. For comparison, this was roughly 30 times more than in 2014,” Frontex said in a report.
The agency responsible for coordinating the security of EU land and sea borders noted that the refugee crisis exposed “clear limits of border controls in the absence of uniform EU-wide migration and asylum policies.”
The European Union is currently struggling to manage a massive refugee crisis dubbed by Frontex as the worst refugee crisis since the World War II, with hundreds of thousands of people leaving conflict-torn countries in the Middle East and North Africa to escape violence and poverty and seeking asylum in Europe.