Via Thomson Reuters: EU migrant arrivals 170,000 in Sept, border agency Frontex says. Excerpt:
Some 170,000 irregular migrants entered the European Union in September, the bloc's border agency Frontex said on Tuesday, taking the total for the year so far to 710,000.
That compares with 282,000 migrants crossing irregularly for the whole of 2014 as Europe faces its biggest refugee crisis since World War Two. Some of the increase may reflect double-counting, notably due to a surge in people arriving in Greece but then crossing the Balkans and re-entering the EU in Hungary.
In August, Frontex said in its latest statement, it recorded 190,000 irregular arrivals, many of them by sea to Greece, setting a fifth consecutive monthly record. It had earlier reported 156,000 irregular border crossings in August.
The rapidly collated figures on those people detected provide a rough monthly snapshot of migration flows. Statistics on asylum claims in the EU, which lag behind, showed some 400,000 people claimed protection at the bloc's borders in the first half of this year, compared with 625,000 in all of 2014.
In all, 350,000 people reached Greece from January to September, Frontex said, of whom 49,000 arrived in September alone, many of them Syrians.
A shortage of boats in Libya and worsening weather helped to halve the number of migrants arriving in Italy in September to 12,000, Frontex said, bringing the total for the first nine months in Italy to 129,000, many of them from Eritrea.
