Foreigners’ Affairs Service Director Slobodan Ujic told N1 that Bosnia should seriously reconsider closing its border with Serbia and Montenegro because the migrant situation in the country is getting more complex. Migrants keep coming and Bosnia’s accommodation facilities are limited.

The migrant structure has changed drastically in the past 25 days because the number of migrants and refugees from conflict areas has decreased but the number of economic migrants has increased, drastically.

“Less than 20 percent are refugees. The vast majority are economic migrants. These are men in 90 percent of the cases, between 25 and 30 years of age,” Ujic said.

However, the problem is that most of them get registered so they would receive the asylum-seeker status, in order to across Bosnia freely for 14 days.

“They simply refuse to step one foot off their route. We will do everything to relocate them out of urban areas because we also feel the pressure from the residents. The situation in the Una-Sana Canton (north of Bosnia) is the hardest. Some 3,000 migrant reside there,” Ujic added. “Almost 99 percent of them have no documents. They destroy their identification documents so we can’t prove their identity and where they’re coming from.”

He warns that should Bosnia have a situation where it would have 10,000 migrants within its borders, it would represent a serious security risk for the country.

“We can already feel the pressure from the Croatian border. Their helicopter service is present at the border 24/7 and the migrants find it difficult to cross the border. We must close our border with our eastern neighbours, Serbia and Montenegro, in order to stop the migrant inflow, otherwise, we will face a serious humanitarian and security crisis,” Ujic concluded.

During the past several months, Bosnia has become a transit country for migrants travelling to the EU. So far, some 5,000 migrants entered the country. No migrant was granted asylum, so far.