1 million refugees entered Europe this year

The number of people coming from North Africa across the Mediterranean into Italy dropped slightly this year, from 170,000 in 2014 to around 150,000.

The International Organisation for Migration says the vast majority have crossed by sea, with more than 800,000 travelling from Turkey to Greece.

“The number of people displaced by war and conflict is the highest in Western and Central Europe since the Balkan crises of the 1990s”, when several conflicts broke out in the former Yugoslavia, he said.

More than 1 million refugees entered Europe during the a year ago, the largest movement of migrants in the region since World War II.

Half of those arriving to Greece, Bulgaria, Italy, Spain, Malta and Cyprus by December 21 were Syrians fleeing war, another 20 percent were Afghans, and seven percent were Iraqis. Another 706 people are known to have died trying to cross the Aegean between the Turkish coast and a number of nearby Greek islands.

Greek authorities say a small plastic boat carrying migrants from Turkey to Europe has sunk off an eastern Greek islet drowning at least 13, mostly children.

Though the European reaction was initially chaotic, with border crossings for people moving northwards from Greece proving to be particularly hard, the refugee agency indicated that a more coordinated response is beginning to take shape.

IOM director-general William Lacy Swing says migration must be legal and safe for both the migrants and the countries that become their new homes, The Huffington Post reports.

With just days left in 2015, the Geneva-based group said 1,005,504 people had entered Europe as of Monday, more than four times as many as a year ago. We must also act.

The waves of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere fleeing conflict-ridden homelands have fueled an “unprecedented anti-migrant sentiment”, he said. This is really a global issue and needs to be dealt with as such, and I think is increasingly being done so, a little late but better late than never.

The EU is also investing funds, assistance and assets in Turkey and countries neighboring Libya that migrants leave or travel across to get to Europe. Around 3,700 died or went missing in perilous journeys while human smugglers reaped a bonanza, according to the International Organization for Migration yesterday. That figure includes more than 100,000 migrants from European non-EU states such as Albania and Kosovo, and are not included in the IOM figures.

While European leaders are calling for all EU nations to pitch on and resettle a certain number of refugees, various administrations are rejecting the call.