ATHENS: The immigration Minister Tasia Christodoulopoulou said that “If the flow of migrants continues at this pace, we will have 100,000 arrivals by the end of 2015”.
The Greece government on Tuesday said it planned to create shelters on the mainland to deal with an influx of illegal boat migrants arriving on the shores of its islands. The decision was made at an emergency cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. It came after more than 700 migrants and refugees, mainly Syrians and Africans, arrived in Greece between Friday and Tuesday, with the island of Lesbos in the Aegean Sea receiving around 500 of them.
Lesbos is off the western coast of Turkey and is one of the main arrival points for illegal migrants. The government said in a statement after the meeting that all island arrivals would now be transferred to “reception centres” on the mainland where refugees and economic migrants will be separated.
