Detections of illegal crossings of EU external borders

Recently, the EU’s external borders have come under strain due to a dramatic surge in the number of people crossing them, either legally or illegally. The number of non-EU citizens travelling to the EU has increased from 49 million individuals (191 million border crossings) in 2014, to 50 million individuals (200 million border crossings) in 2015. It has been estimated that the number of non-EU travellers will continue to increase and will reach 76 million (302 million border crossings) by 2025. The number of illegal crossings detected at the EU’s external borders reached 1.8 million in 2015, despite efforts to stop this flow, but decreased to 0.5 million in 2016 and ca 0.2 million in 2017 (see Figure 1). The unprecedented influx of irregular migrants exposed deficiencies in the EU border management system and led to the temporary reintroduction of checks along several internal borders