Refugees are costing Slovenia more than $800,000 a day: interior minister

Slovenia is spending $860,500 a day to handle its streams of arriving refugees, Interior Minister Vesna Gyorkos Znidar says.

“According to our calculations, our daily cost related to the migration crisis amounts to 770,000 euros ($860,500), which within six months will amount to 140 million,” she says after a meeting with EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos in Ljubljana.

This covers everything from tents, beds, sanitary equipment, heating, water, food and health care for the refugees to equipment for police and vehicles to transport migrants to reception centers, she says.

Slovenia has seen 12,600 migrants arrive over the past 24 hours and as many as 43,000 people in the last five days, Gyorkos Znidar says. She calls for external European borders in Greece and Croatia to be better controlled, complaining that migrants are arriving in Greece “completely uncontrolled.”