Bulgaria will eventually join Schengen Area

The Netherlands expects to see the progress report of the European Commission on Bulgaria in December before taking a decision on the country's Schengen bid, according to Dutch Ambassador to Bulgaria Karel van Kesteren.

In an interview for the BGNES news agency, he said that Bulgaria would eventually join the Schengen area but refused to commit to a concrete deadline.

Karel van Kesteren and Filip Gunev, Bulgaria's Deputy Interior Minister, attended the presentation of a project of the International Organization for Migration to be implemented in Bulgaria over the next three years thanks to the financial support of the Dutch government.

Gunev hopes that by the time the project was completed, Bulgaria would be a Schengen Member State.

The Dutch Ambassador stated "We are experiencing difficulties with a large number of illegal immigrants coming to the Netherlands because our country has a good and generous social security system. We have no way of accommodating one billion people, so the migration flows must be restricted and rules must be put in place, which is not easy "

"We have a lot of immigrants from Afghanistan, Somalia and other countries," he said, adding that countries guarding EU's external border were experiencing problems with immigrants and the best way to resolve these issues was through joint efforts.