Prime Minister Edi Rama is trying to prove that Albania has a serious illegal immigration problem of Syrian refugees. To this end, he is attempting to inflate the numbers of immigrants who have entered Albania.
Prime Minister Rama, citing no source whatsoever, not even an institution within his own government, has presented a figure twice as high as that reported by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), at a time when Albania is the country with the lowest number of registered immigrants in the region.
In a meeting with Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, Rama claimed that 2,311 illegal immigrants had entered Albania between January and May of 2018:
To form a clear idea of what concerns us, and for what reasons we have turned, for a few weeks, to our friends here in Austria, to form a collaboration now, without waiting for things to go as far as they did in 2015: if between January and May of the previous year, we have had 162 illegal immigrants, this year, between January and May, their number is 2,311.
However, according to an IOM report, between January and May of 2018, only 1,180 illegal immigrants have been registered as having entered Albania. The report states that
From January to May, 2018, 6,700 new illegal immigrants have entered the EU, via Greece, through Albania, Montenegro, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Out of those, more than two thirds, that is around 4,227 people, have been registered in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1,362 in Montenegro, and only 1,180 in Albania.
