BERLIN (Sputnik) – The European Union is going to stop or at least to reduce illegal migration and wants to fight the roots of the problem, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Friday after an informal meeting of EU leaders in Bratislava.
“We said that we want, if possible, to stop illegal migration, at least to reduce it very significantly… We want to conclude agreements with fare more states and help them to improve the situation on the ground so that people do not need to flee,” Merkel said during a press conference.
The European Union is currently struggling to manage a massive refugee crisis, with hundreds of thousands of people fleeing conflict-torn countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The EU border agency Frontex recorded more than 1.8 million illegal border crossings into the bloc in 2015.
