Half a million migrants are thought to be amassing on the shores of Libya waiting to make the crossing to European ground. The Royal Naval ship NHS Bulwark rescued 1,300 migrants from overcrowded boats heading across the Mediterranean this weekend, but as the European Commission prepares to welcome them, hundreds of thousands more are preparing to follow in their footsteps.
The true scale of the migrant problem facing Europe has been known for some time now. In March of this year, Fabrice Leggeri, chief of Frontex, the EU’s border security agency headquartered in Warsaw, Poland, told the Italian news agency ANSA: “We have to be ready to address a more difficult situation than last year. According to the sources, we have been told there are from 500,000 to a million migrants ready to leave from Libya.”
Despite the warning, the leader of the UK Independence Party Nigel Farage was jeered when he told the European Parliament that hundreds of thousands were on their way, and that hiding in the slipstream were Islamic jihadists looking for an easy passage into Europe.
“We simply can’t accept countless millions”, Mr Farage said. “There is a real and genuine threat. When ISIS say they want to flood our continent with half a million Islamic extremists, they mean it.
“I fear we face a direct threat to our civilisation if we allow large numbers of people from that war-torn region into Europe.”
Just weeks later Mr Farage was proved correct when Abdel Majid Touil, a 22-year-old Moroccan wanted in connection with the Islamic State attack on the Bardo Museum in Tunis which left 22 dead was arrested near Milan.
Since then, Norway has discovered that as many as ten of the refugees hand picked by the EU for relocation to it’s shores under the Union’s asylum seeker program have terrorist links. They include men with ties to al-Nusra and ISIS, as well as people suspected of belonging to Syria’s secret police.
Britain currently spends £726,000 a day on asylum seekers. That figure is set to rise if the EU has it’s way, as they have allocated the UK a quota of 2,309 migrants, mostly from Syria and Eritrea, out of a total of 20,000 who have not yet even crossed onto European soil but are waiting to do so.
The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said that the EU scheme – which grants asylum to people who are fleeing from “poverty” – is “bordering on insanity”.
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