Bulgaria expelled 1755 non-EU nationals in 2017 – Eurostat
Bulgaria returned a total of 1755 non-EU nationals to their countries in 2017 after issuing them orders to leave, according to figures released by EU statistics agency Eurostat on July 9.
This was an increase from 1215 in 2016.
In 2017, a total of 2870 non-EU nationals were refused entry to Bulgaria, up from 2170 in 2016, Eurostat said.
A total of 2595 non-EU nationals were found to be illegally present in Bulgaria in 2017, significantly lower than the 14 125 the year before.
A total of 2600 non-EU citizens were ordered to leave in 2017, also much lower than the 2016 figure of 14 120.
Eurostat said that in 2017, 618 780 non-EU citizens were found to be illegally present in the EU.
The number of non-EU citizens who were issued with an order to leave the EU reached 516 115 persons. Following the receipt of an order to leave the territory of an EU member state, about 213 505 non-EU citizens were returned to another country, of these 188 905 to a non-EU country.
The number of non-EU citizens who were refused entry into the EU stood at 439 505 in 2017.
In 2017, 618 780 non-EU citizens were found to be illegally present in the EU. This was down by 37 per cent compared with one year before (983 860) and by 71 per cent when compared with the peak of 2015 when the total number of non-EU citizens found to be illegally present stood at 2 154 675.
The EU member state which reported the largest number of non-EU citizens found to be illegally present in 2017 was Germany (156 710), followed by France (115 085), Greece (68 110), the United Kingdom (54 910) and Spain (44 625). These five member states together accounted for 71 per cent of all those found to be illegally present in the EU.
The total number of non-EU citizens ordered to leave EU territories increased by 4.5 per cent to 516 115 in 2017 compared with 493 785 in 2016.
The EU member state which reported the largest number of non-EU citizens ordered to leave its territory in 2017 was Germany (97 165), followed by France (84 675) and the United Kingdom (54 910). Only those three Member States recorded double-digit shares of persons ordered to leave EU territories in the EU total (respectively 19 per cent, 16 per cent and 11 per cent).
In 2017, 188 905 non-EU citizens who had been issued with an order to leave the territories of an EU Member State were returned outside of the EU; a reduction of 17 per cent when compared with a year before, when there had been 228 625 non-EU citizens returned to a non-EU Member State.
Germany reported the largest number of non-EU citizens returned to a third country (44 960), followed by the United Kingdom (29 090) and Poland (22 165).
In 2017, some 439 505 non-EU citizens were refused entry into the EU at one of its external borders, up 13 per cent compared with 388 280 in the previous year.
Nearly half of the total number of refusals were recorded in Spain (203 025), with the next highest numbers in France (86 320) and Poland (38 660); together these three EU Member States accounted for three quarters (75 per cent) of the total number of non-EU citizens refused entry into the EU in 2017.
