Bulgaria wants to be included in the Schengen area without border controls. Irregular migration prevents that. The country has now launched a nationwide campaign against people smugglers.
The police in Bulgaria arrested a good 300 irregular migrants and 15 people smugglers. This was announced by the Ministry of the Interior and the Attorney General of the south-eastern EU country. In the capital Sofia and in other cities, searches were carried out at dozens of addresses as part of the nationwide campaign against people smugglers.
The smugglers are “extraordinarily inventive” when it comes to the routes and transport of migrants, said Secretary General of the Interior Ministry Petar Todorov. A good 40 migrants, including children, were discovered on Thursday in a tanker truck near the village of Tschepinzi, not far from Sofia. The vehicle had been modified to carry people.
Bulgaria wants to be included in the Schengen area without border controls by 2024 together with the neighboring country Romania. Because of irregular migration, Austria blocked the Schengen accession of the countries in December 2022. The Netherlands only opposed Bulgaria’s Schengen membership.
Since 2017, the Bulgarian EU external border with Turkey, which is 259 kilometers long on the mainland, has been completely protected by a barbed wire fence and monitored with thermal imaging cameras. Migrants often cross this border irregularly to avoid being registered at a border point in Bulgaria, and then usually continue to Central and Western Europe.
Source: Stern
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