Turkey’s president said Tuesday that the country would not be able to shoulder a new potential migration wave on its own.
Speaking in Istanbul at the 6th Ministerial Conference of the Budapest Process on Migration, Recep Tayyip Erdogan said building higher walls with barbed wire was no way to prevent irregular migration.
There are around 260 million migrants, over 68 million displaced people and more than 25 million refugees worldwide, he said, underscoring that these numbers are increasing day by day due to hunger, famine, civil wars, terrorist attacks, political uncertainties and economic reasons.
Turkey has spent over $37 billion of its own national resources sheltering refugees, he added, citing UN figures.