(Bloomberg) -- U.S. President Donald Trump suggested building a wall across the Sahara as a means to help solve the European migration crisis, Spain's Foreign Minister Josep Borrell said.
“Closing the ports is not a solution, as neither is it a solution to build a wall across the Sahara, as President Trump suggested to me recently,” Borrell said at a lunch in Madrid on Tuesday.
Increased numbers of migrants from Africa have been arriving on Spain's shores this year as Europe struggles to come up with a common strategy for dealing with their plight. Spain has two enclaves -- the cities of Ceuta and Melilla -- on the North African coast.
El Pais newspaper carried Borrell's comments in a video posted on its website. Filling nearly all of North Africa, the Sahara measures approximately 3,000 miles from east to west, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
No one at the press department of the U.S. Embassy in Madrid was immediately available for comment when contacted by phone.
To contact the reporter on this story: Charles Penty in Madrid at cpenty@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alan Crawford at acrawford6@bloomberg.net;Vidya Root at vroot@bloomberg.net
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