The head of the EU border agency said that the EU is preparing for the influx of Afghans seeking asylum, regardless of whether people collectively flee the new Taliban government, and pointed out that millions of people have been displaced in neighboring countries.
In an interview, Frontex Director General Fabrice Leggeri told Reuters that the agency is preparing for a possible surge, both through the traditional route from Turkey to Greece and through Belarus. The new routes, Brussels accused these routes of sending illegal immigrants across the border.
He said that Frontex is “monitoring what is happening within Afghanistan,” while also paying close attention to the Afghan communities in neighboring countries, including Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
“Our expectation is that, depending on the situation in Afghanistan, people in need of international protection may of course try to flee Afghanistan. But what is most likely to happen first is that Afghan communities living abroad may try to emigrate to the European Union.”
After the 2015-2016 crisis, the European Union sought to reform its immigration system. At that time, more than one million people arrived, most of whom traveled across the Balkans to Northern Europe on foot.
Leggeri said the EU is now better at repatriating immigrants who do not have a valid asylum application in their country of origin.
As long as it is not safe to send Afghans home, immigrants from other countries may enter the country as Afghans. Leggeri said border guards are now more able to determine where people come from than they were six years ago.
“Now you can’t send Afghans back to Afghanistan. Of course we can’t. But we can repatriate those who pretend to be Afghans and they are not,” he said. He said that experts now stationed on the external borders of the EU can assess a person’s nationality by listening to dialects and speaking methods.
Afghan migrants may be involved in disputes between Europe and Belarus. The European Union accused Belarus of flying migrants from the Middle East and sending them illegally across the border, resulting in a 1,500% increase in the number of illegally entering Lithuania. Minsk denies that it promotes illegal immigration, but said Europe must lift sanctions if it wants to stop sanctions.
“What happened in Belarus was clearly an eye-opener for everyone,” Legri said. “The way to deliberately promote immigration…criminal networks want to make money, but state organizations want to deal with geopolitics, which is another matter.”
“From the perspective of immigration, whether the crisis in Afghanistan may be related to our crisis in Belarus depends on geopolitical factors.”
