Estonia faces genuine challenges from irregular migration, but repeated warnings of a potential crisis risk amplifying public fears beyond what the numbers warrant, writes Keidi Jaakson.
In mid-October, Rainis Sinikas, head of the border and migration supervision department at the Police and Border Guard Board's (PPA) North Prefecture, told ERR that the situation with irregular migrants in Estonia is "difficult and could turn into a crisis situation," that administrative courts and local governments are overloaded and that the entire cooperation network is under great strain. A few days earlier, PPA chief Egert Belitšev warned that migration pressure could rise sharply as people try to leave Belarus ahead of winter, describing organized routes that cost each person up to €10,000. Interior Minister Igor Taro has called the situation "part of Russia's overall aggression tactics" and declared that Estonia must send a clear message that it cannot be used as a transit corridor. So far this year, the PPA has detained 542 people from 48 countries, both within Estonia and at its borders, and returned 120 of them to Latvia.
There are real operational and security challenges behind these numbers. According to Egert Belitšev, Russia and Belarus facilitate routes organized by criminal networks, with people paying thousands of euros to reach the EU. Processing people who arrive without documents, establishing their identities and routes and pursuing those responsible for facilitating irregular crossings is demanding work. ERR has reported that tighter border controls in Poland and Lithuania have redirected part of these flows towards Estonia. The pressure on local services is also documented: Rae Municipality, where the main detention center is located, is considering legal action against the state and the Social Insurance Board has acknowledged that it was unprepared for the increase. But public concern about immigration is not simply a reflection of how many people arrive across the border. It is also shaped by how much attention, and what kind of attention, the issue itself receives.
James Dennison and Andrew Geddes of the European University Institute's Migration Policy Center recently published "What Europeans Think About Immigration and Why It Matters," drawing on 25 years of survey data across Europe. Their research suggests that public attitudes towards immigration are more stable and more nuanced than commonly assumed and that, where they change, they tend to actually become more favorable over time. What changes more readily is what the researchers call salience: how much attention immigration receives as a political issue. This can be shaped by institutional communication, political rhetoric and media coverage. Speaking at the book's launch at the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels, Dennison argued that people who consider immigration an important political issue are disproportionately likely to hold restrictive views. Raising the issue's profile can therefore benefit one part of the political spectrum. He also warned that political parties often confuse the growing prominence of immigration with a shift in what people actually believe about it, responding to heightened attention as though it necessarily reflected more restrictive public attitudes.
The language used to describe the current situation to the Estonian public should be proportionate to its scale. Repeated references to crisis and hybrid attacks can make the situation appear more acute and exceptional than the numbers alone suggest. Estonia has detained 542 people so far this year, while Latvia, which directly borders Belarus, recorded over 8,400 irregular crossing attempts by July 21. Across the EU, Frontex recorded approximately 74,000 irregular border-crossing detections in the first eight months of the year, down 35 percent compared with 2025. These figures measure different things and cannot be compared directly, but they provide context for assessing the language used. In an ERR report published on October 19, Taro himself said that Estonia had not yet exhausted its capacity to handle migrants and that the situation could only be described as a crisis once existing resources were no longer sufficient, with several hundred detention places across the country still vacant. By the interior minister's own measure, then, the situation has not reached the point of crisis, which makes the persistent language of potential crisis harder to account for.
Dennison and Geddes's research raises questions about how the current framing of immigration in Estonia may shape public perceptions. Detentions are routinely reported as separate events, often with considerable operational detail. PPA statements repeatedly warn that institutions are overloaded and that the situation could turn into a crisis. The interior minister has urged people to report suspicious individuals. Such communication may increase the prominence of immigration in public debate and encourage people to view it primarily through the lens of security, even if it does not change their underlying attitudes.
In the Spring 2024 Eurobarometer, 29 percent of Estonian respondents agreed that immigrants contribute positively to the country, tied with Cyprus for one of the lowest figure in the EU. The 2018 European Social Survey found that just over half of Estonians thought the state should allow few or no people of a different race or ethnic group to move to Estonia, though the same data shows that attitudes have been slowly becoming more favorable over time. Against this backdrop, repeatedly framing immigration as a potential crisis risks reinforcing the perception that it is primarily a threat.
The deliberate instrumentalization of migration by Russia and Belarus is a genuine security concern, yet recognizing that threat does not require treating everyone travelling along these routes as a threat in themselves. The largest groups among those detained this year come from Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Bangladesh, several of which are affected by armed conflict or severe human rights abuses. EU law provides no visa for the purpose of seeking asylum, so in most cases protection can only be claimed once a person is already on European territory. Arrivals along these routes are unlikely to stop and Estonia needs the capacity to process them effectively.
And Estonia has demonstrated that it can mobilize considerable institutional capacity when the political and public context supports it. In 2022, more than 43,000 Ukrainian refugees arrived, amounting to over 3 percent of the population. The legal framework was different, the circumstances were different and the public solidarity was grounded in a shared sense of threat from Russia. But the experience shows what Estonia can organize when political priorities and public solidarity align. The question is whether the capacity can be rebuilt for people whose reasons for seeking protection may be less immediately legible to the Estonian public.
The debate also raises questions about who attracts suspicion and on what grounds. An operation in Nõmme on October 11 began when residents reported two dark-skinned men who appeared unfamiliar with the area. In August, ERR reported that police had already received unfounded reports about people based solely on their skin colour and PPA representative Indrek Aru acknowledged that in one case the person who had been reported "had all the necessary documents, was completely law-abiding and even spoke Estonian." In its account of the October incident, however, the PPA said that reports were generally prompted by behavior rather than race, while acknowledging that people from a different ethnic background stand out more in a suburb like Nõmme where residents tend to recognize one another. Sinikas also pointed to muddy clothing as one reason groups of migrants might attract attention in autumn.
The gender equality and equal treatment commissioner's 2024 report on racial discrimination documented experiences of racism among people of color in Estonia, including verbal abuse and physical threats, much of it unreported. The difficulty lies in how authorities distinguish legitimate reports based on specific behavior from suspicion based primarily on someone's appearance, particularly when the police themselves acknowledge that skin color can influence who attracts attention. That distinction deserves more public discussion than it currently receives.
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