LESOVO, Bulgaria — Less than two decades after the painstaking removal of a massive border fence designed to keep people in, Bulgarian authorities are just as painstakingly building a new fence along the rugged Turkish border, this time to keep people out.
Faced with a surge of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa — and the risk that they include jihadis intent on terrorist attacks — Europe is bolstering its defenses on many fronts, including this formerly Communist country, which little more than a quarter-century ago was more concerned with stanching the outbound flow of its own citizens to freedom. For the past 16 months, Bulgaria has been carrying out a plan that would sound familiar to anyone along the United States-Mexico frontier: more border officers, new surveillance equipment and the first 20-mile section of its border fence, which was finished in September.
The hardening of the Bulgaria-Turkey border is one very visible manifestation of the agitation across the continent about the economic, social and political ramifications of the surge in immigration. With warmer weather fast approaching and more refugees likely to be on the move, nations along Europe’s southern tier are beefing up border staffing, adding sensors and other technical barriers, expanding refugee facilities, and building walls.
More than 200,000 refugees are known to have penetrated Europe’s land and sea borders last year, not including those who were able to sneak through undetected.
And the numbers for the first two months of this year, when Europe enjoyed its second mild winter in a row, were up sharply compared with the same period last year.
Anti-immigrant sentiment is increasing in Britain, France, Hungary, the Czech Republic and elsewhere across the continent. Parties espousing ethnic nationalism are seeing their support rise, some to the point where they threaten the dominance of more traditional parties.
“The rise of the right wing in Europe is a reaction to this refugee flow,” said Boris B. Cheshirkov, chief spokesman in Bulgaria for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
And with much of Europe still struggling to recover from the 2008 financial crisis, the higher costs of caring for this flood of refugees — especially in countries like Bulgaria, the poorest member of the European Union — are straining national budgets.
At the same time, episodes like the January attack on the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo are raising worries that both homegrown jihadists and foreign fighters will cloak themselves in this refugee flood.
“Right now, in the western part of Turkey, on the borders of Greece and Bulgaria, you probably have thousands of Syrian refugees waiting for an occasion to cross,” said Marc Pierini, an expert on Turkey and the Middle East at Carnegie Europe, a foreign policy analysis group. “If you talk about returning jihadists, you are talking about dozens.”
Slavcho Velkov, a Bulgarian security expert and university lecturer, said he believed there was more jihadist movement through Bulgaria than the authorities acknowledged.
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