The number of immigrants in Switzerland without a legal residence permit has continued to drop over the past few years, according to the Swiss Border Guards.
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تراجع قياسي لعدد حالات الهجرة غير الشرعية إلى سويسرا
The national law enforcement agency said it recorded 16,563 cases in 2019, down from 27,300 in 2018 and 48,830 the year before.
The overall number of illegal stays has plummeted by nearly 75% since 2015, according to the news agency, Keystone-SDA.
Immigrants from Nigeria made up the biggest group last year, ahead of citizens from Albania, Algeria, Gambia and Morocco, according to data published by the Federal Customs Administration on Wednesday.
In comparison, illegal immigrants from Eritrea topped the list in 2016.
Most people (6,489) without a legal residence permit in Switzerland were picked up while travelling on trains, nearly 5,500 in road vehicles, about 950 on planes and almost 20 on boats trying to cross the border.
Last year, the security forces also arrested 405 suspected human traffickers, most of them Syrians, Turks and Swiss.
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Switzerland and Italy have begun joint border patrols following a deal aimed at combatting illegal immigration between the two neighbouring countries.
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Malfunctions led to a worldwide outage of the social media platform X several times on Monday, affecting users in Switzerland and elsewhere.
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The Swiss bank UBS was fined €75,000 (CHF71,410), the maximum penalty, in Paris on Monday for moral harassment by its French subsidiary of two whistleblowers.
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Wildlife wardens in the eastern canton of Graubünden, together with hunters, shot 48 wolves between September 2024 and January 2025, authorities said on Monday.
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Singer-songwriter Zoë Më, who will represent Switzerland at the Eurovision Song Contest 2025 in Basel, unveiled her ballad Voyage on Monday.
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The Swiss government's reaction to the current crisis in multilateralism is not congruent with what is at stake for International Geneva, says the head of the Geneva Government.
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At the stroke of 4am on Monday, the street lights went out in Basel's city center for the carnival kick-off, known as Morgenstreich.
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A total of 339 Guineans filed official requests for asylum in Switzerland between January and March 2017, a 280% increase on the same period last year. Neighbouring Germany recorded 1,275 Guinean asylum seekers, an even bigger rise of 600% for the first quarter of 2017 compared with 2016. During the same period, 1,100 people from…
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