The number of immigrants passing through Bulgaria tripled in 2021

Between January and November 2021, the number of migrants detained while entering and leaving the Bulgarian border illegally and those who crossed without being detected by the police increased, according to data from the Bulgarian Interior Ministry, Dnevnik reports. bg, broadcasts the Bulgarian news agency BTA.

According to a telegram, since the beginning of 2021, the Bulgarian Interior Ministry has detained 9,574 undocumented immigrants, a number three times higher than in 2020, when 3,000 people were detained. Data from the Bulgarian Interior Ministry do not include data from December. During the last month of the year, the number of immigrants usually decreases due to the cold weather.

However, this is the first significant increase in the number of migrants on an annual basis since 2016. According to the Bulgarian agency, in 2016 30,000 migrants were detained in the country and since then the number has been declining. 2021 is the first year that the migratory pressure at the borders and inside the country intensified. In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, due to stricter controls due to Covid, the number of immigrants decreased.

In the summer of 2021, then-Interior Minister Boyko Raskov, who retained his post in Prime Minister Kirill Petkov’s cabinet, said the new wave of immigration was heading to Bulgaria because of the Afghanistan crisis. At the time, migrants were hiding in trucks carrying timber and the trafficking was organized by people who had been granted refugee status in Bulgaria, according to the BTA.

Source: AMPE