A criminal industry has flourished, while the European Union has beefed up its border agency Frontex to try to check the mass migration. Frontex is at once both good cop and bad cop, rescuing migrants from sinking boats but also dropping them off at welcome centres where they risk being sent back home. Frontex head Fabrice Leggeri summed up the situation in an interview with AFP.
- Who are the migrants? -
On the shores of Greece there are now "80 or 100 people who arrive every day, whereas we had 2,500 a day" before the agreement with Turkey, said Leggeri. Among those who arrive from Africa via the central Mediterranean and Libya, whose number is up by more than 40 percent, most come from west Africa. They are Senegalese, Guineans, Nigerians. In 2016 they totalled 180,000.
As ever greater numbers of migrants risk their lives to cross the Mediterranean from Africa, the European Union has beefed up its border agency Frontex to try and check the mass influx.
They are mainly economic migrants and include many young men but also families and young women. Nigerian women are often exploited as prostitutes in Europe. "It's not the poorest who leave, because they have to be able to pay the smugglers," said Leggeri. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), of the more than one million people who made it to Europe in 2015, 850,000 crossed into Greece via the Aegean Sea. More than half came from Syria and most of the rest from Afghanistan and Iraq.
Following a landmark EU-Turkey accord in March 2016, the total number arriving in Europe by sea fell that year to around 363,000, IOM figures show. But as the number of arrivals in Greece dropped, the figures arriving from north Africa started to grow. By mid-April 2017, "some 36,000 migrants had arrived in Italy since the beginning of the year, or an increase of 43 percent over the same period last year," according to Frontex.
- Who are the smugglers? -
