Estonia, Legislation, Transport

Police and Border Guard Board information bureau head Ago Tikk said that the reason was simple: smarter immigrants have found a comfortable and cheap way of how to try to get to Western Europe risk free. "It is in essence a 100% risk free undertaking to enter the territory of a member state with legally valid visa, and the main risk is refusal to grant a visa and the risk generally only costs the cost of a visa fee. As compared to acquiring forged documents or running across the land border on all fours it is considerably cheaper and more risk free." said Tikk.

Out of the 53 illegal border crossers caught in the first quarter of this year, 36 tried to get to the Schengen area with a visa applied for an innocent purpose.

Border guards however look very carefully at the visa application reasons. "Applying for a visa for participating in business, tourism or sports events, training camps, culture festivals, in order to try and get to the EU territory to live there illegally is frequent. An interesting example we could cite is the wish of an alleged Nigerian bicycle Olympic team to come to Estonia to participate at outdoors training in February," said Tikk.