"Police have stopped 290 people attempting to cross the border between Serbia and Hungary and illegally enter the European Union," Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic said on Friday. He said that Kosovo Albanians had submitted 60,000 applications for Serbian passport in recent time.
Citizens of Kosovo, which has a population of 1.8 million, need a visa to enter the EU, while Serbian citizens can travel freely to most of the 28 EU countries.
Hungarian police have reported that about 10,000 Albanians tried to enter Hungary illegally in January alone, which is only 20 per cent of all immigrants who try to get to western Europe by crossing the border illegally, venturing across woods, fields and canals.
The mayor of the Hungarian border town of Asothalom has demanded that a fence be put up for "protection" against illegal immigrants crossing the border near the town.
Most immigrants are between 20 and 30 years old, but there are also entire families with small children. They are fleeing poverty in Kosovo and heading for Hungary, which is in the Schengen passport-free zone, hoping to get to Germany as a promised land, according to the Belgrade daily Blic.
The Hungarian authorities have said that they have received nearly 13,000 asylum applications since the start of the year, compared with 43,000 in the whole of 2014.
Media in Vojvodina estimate that about 50,000 have left Kosovo in the past few months.