The European Commission – the EU’s executive arm – published its European Economic Forecast for 2015 to 2017 on Thursday, stating that “three million persons” are expected to arrive in the 28-nation bloc by 2017.
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“And in Europe we can’t say simply that those who are the closest to the problem, and therefore receive most of the migrants, have to handle it themselves”.
Thousands died during perilous voyages, as greedy people-smugglers pocketed huge sums by trading in human misery.
As Tsipras and Schulz landed on the island, a group of protesters entered the Lesbos town hall and unfurled a banner that read “The Aegean is full of migrant corpses, Europeans murderers of peoples”.
Migrants and refugees gather around a bonfire in a deserted holiday home as they wait to cross to the Greek island of Chios from Cesme in the Turkish province of Izmir, on November 3, 2015.
He was speaking on a visit to a packed migrant registration centre with Martin Schulz, head of the European Parliament.
“Harsh weather conditions in the region are likely to exacerbate the suffering of the thousands of refugees and migrants landing in Greece and travelling through the Balkans, and may result in further loss of life if adequate measures are not taken urgently”, UNHCR said.
The government says, however, it has made preparations to shelter refugees should they begin arriving in Albania during the winter.
Lesbos authorities on Tuesday called a three-day period of mourning in the memory of those who drowned trying to reach the island. “We are hungry. I have two children, my children are sick”, one man shouted at Tsipras. “We will do our best”. The United Nations refugee agency UNHCR launched a new funding appeal on Thursday, saying it needed $96.15 million in additional support for Greece and affected Balkan countries.
Tsipras later said traffickers were making a tidy profit by packing people “not in boats, but in makeshift rubber tubes”.
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So far this year, a few 700,000 people have come to Europe in the hope of asylum and work, inundating refugee centers and border controls across the continent. Sean Callahan, chief operating officer of Catholic Relief Services, which has been working throughout the Balkans to provide emergency relief there, said in testimony before a USA congressional committee that the pope’s words and actions remind us “of our moral obligation to help the stranger”.
