Immediately ahead of the deliberations of the EU interior ministers on the extension of the Schengen area to Croatia, Bulgaria and Romania, the Ministry of the Interior released the latest figures on migration routes. “Smuggling routes are increasingly leading through Romania and Bulgaria,” the authority said on Wednesday evening, referring to analyzes by the Federal Criminal Police. Austria wants to vote against the Schengen accession of Sofia and Bucharest on Thursday.
“Both Romania and Bulgaria are part of the smuggling routes affecting Austria,” said Gerald Tatzgern, head of anti-smuggling at the Federal Criminal Investigation Department, according to an Interior Ministry broadcast. This was substantiated by the interviews of illegal migrants and arrested smugglers, but also by the results of the evaluation of the geodata of more than 400 seized mobile phones.
Romania is considered an easy border to cross
Among the smuggler groups, Bulgaria is considered a transit country, organizing onward towage via Serbia or Romania, it said. Romanians rank fourth among the top 10 nationalities of human traffickers in Austria. Compared to Hungary, Romania is considered to have a border that is quite easy to cross and is therefore often chosen as a route from Serbia to Hungary. In particular, the border measures in Greece repeatedly led to a route shift to the Turkish-Bulgarian border.
Bulgaria and Romania were also frequently mentioned in the surveys. According to this report, 78 percent of Afghans list Bulgaria as the first EU country, as do two-thirds of Moroccans. In contrast, 50 percent of people from Bangladesh report having traveled via Romania.
Asylum applications: increase of more than 200 percent
Austria, the first destination country after the Balkan routes, feels heavily burdened by the increase in migration numbers. According to the Ministry of the Interior, 89,867 asylum applications had been submitted by the end of October, an increase of more than 200 percent compared to the previous year. More than 100,000 migrants were apprehended in Austria in 2022. According to the authorities, about 75,000 of them had not been previously registered and therefore not checked. The proportion of migrants entering Austria via Greece from the Western Balkans is 20 percent. These are mainly people from Pakistan, Somalia and Bangladesh.
40 percent come from Turkey via Bulgaria, mainly people from Afghanistan, Syria, Morocco, Egypt and Somalia. Another 40 percent enter the Balkans by plane without a visa, mainly Indians, Turks and Bangladeshis. The onward route via Romania is also important for flights arriving via Belgrade. These are hardly registered, but 61 percent of all hits on the European fingerprint database Eurodac from the countries India, Turkey and Bangladesh were registered in Romania.
Source: Krone
I am Ida Scott, a journalist and content author with a passion for uncovering the truth. I have been writing professionally for Today Times Live since 2020 and specialize in political news. My career began when I was just 17; I had already developed a knack for research and an eye for detail which made me stand out from my peers.
