Greece wants to ramp up measures on its border with Türkiye and is requesting additional aid from the European Union for it, a report said Tuesday.
The Greek newspaper Kathimerini reported on Tuesday that the number of migrants in Greece could soon rise sharply as a result of increased returns of people who have been granted asylum in the country, or who have applied for asylum there but have then travelled on to Germany.
Reduced welfare benefits for asylum seekers and rejections at German borders are also expected to have an impact on the numbers coming to Greece.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has been critical of the German government's decision to introduce border checks.
Government spokesman Pavlos Marinakis told the TV station Antena on Tuesday that Greece would not become "the punching bag of other countries," and added that it is "not the country that solves problems that other European countries have caused through bad policies."
The government in Athens now wants to extend the fence along the river Evros/Meriç on the Greek-Turkish border and to hire at least 150 additional border guards. Mitsotakis recently called for the EU to provide financial help for this.
Citizen Protection Minister Michalis Chrisochoidis emphasized that Greece was not only protecting Greek borders with these measures but also European borders. "We are complying with the latest EU asylum reform and the rules of the Schengen area," he said during a visit to the border.
While the number of migrants arriving in other countries fell this year, the EU border protection agency Frontex reports that Greece has seen an increase of almost 40% compared to the same period last year. It says around 37,000 people have arrived in Greece since the beginning of 2024.
However, around 30,000 of those irregular arrivals traveled by boat from the west coast of Türkiye to the Greek islands in the eastern Aegean, rather than crossing the land border between the two countries.
Athens built a 40-kilometer steel barrier on the land border between Türkiye and Greece to prevent irregular migration, and the construction process was completed in August 2021.
Ankara and international human rights groups have repeatedly condemned Greece's illegal practice of pushing back asylum-seekers, saying it violates humanitarian values and international law by endangering the lives of vulnerable people, including women and children.
