The number of asylum seekers crossing the Czech Republic dropped in 2017 to negligible numbers, police said on Tuesday amid a presidential election in which illegal migration has become a hot topic.
Although the country was largely untouched by a 2015 influx into the European Union of over one million migrants fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, fears of Muslim immigration have dominated the election debate.
Police said they detained 172 migrants in 2017 who sought to illegally transit the Czech Republic, mostly coming from Austria and heading onwards to neighboring Germany. They were mainly from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.