Asylum cap at ’80 per day’

Austria's interior minister said Wednesday the country would cap the daily number of asylum claims at 80 to slow down the migrant flow at its southern borders.

Published: 17 February 2016 16:33 CET

Photo: Kim Traill

In addition, the government will grant entry to a total of 3,200 migrants per day “who want to seek asylum in a neighbouring state”, Johanna Mikl-Leitner told the APA news agency.

“Austria is among the EU countries most under strain and is reaching breaking point. It stands to reason to want to secure your own borders when there is no European solution,” she said.

The measure will come into effect on Friday, the minister added.

The move comes a day after Vienna said it would step up controls at existing checkpoints along its southern borders with Italy, Slovenia and Hungary to slow down the influx of migrants and refugees trekking up along the Balkans.

The daily limit on asylum claims is in line with Austria's announcement last month that it would only take in 37,500 asylum seekers this year — sharply down from the 90,000 it accepted in 2015.

'Domino effect'

Since January, the country of nearly nine million has already received 11,000 asylum claims, or around 250 a day.

The government has not yet specified what it plans to do once the cap is reached.

In reaction to Austria's restrictions, Slovenia and Croatia have also
toughened controls — a “domino effect” welcomed by Mikl-Leitner.

“It is important that every country along the Balkan route tightens its borders,” said the minister who sees the building of a “fortress Europe” as a solution to Europe's worst migration crisis since World War II.

In 2015, over one million people reached Europe's shores — nearly half of them Syrians fleeing a civil war that has claimed more than 260,000 lives.

The vast majority enter the EU through Italy and Greece, where they should register, but poor controls mean most are able to continue their journeys to northern Europe.

Earlier Wednesday, Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann was quoted as saying he expected Germany to follow his tougher migrant stance and clamp down on the number of asylum seekers allowed into the country.

In 2015, over one million people reached Europe's shores — nearly half of them Syrians fleeing a civil war that has claimed more than 260,000 lives.

The vast majority enter the EU through Italy and Greece, where they should register, but poor controls mean most are able to continue their journeys to northern Europe.

Faymann said Austria still supported a deal proposed by Germany, under which Turkey would seal its borders and then fly refugees to Europe where they would be settled under an EU quota system.

But in the face of the plan's sluggish implementation, Vienna has also joined the so-called “Visegrad Four” — Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic — in wanting tighter border controls inside the EU's passport-free Schengen zone.

On Thursday, Faymann and his German counterpart Angela Merkel will host talks with nine EU countries and Turkey in Brussels, before a summit the same day involving all 28 bloc leaders.

With the German far right coming out on top in two state elections earlier this month, the socialist-led national Berlin government has reimposed border controls on Western frontiers that are supposed to see freedom of movement in the European Union’s Schengen zone.

The Netherlands government, which includes the party of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, announced on Wednesday that it had requested from Brussels an opt-out from EU rules on asylum, with Prime Minister Dick Schoof declaring that there was an asylum “crisis”.

Meanwhile, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the left-wing Labour Party paid a visit to Rome for talks with Italian counterpart Georgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, to discuss the strategies used by Italy in seeking to reduce migration.

Far-right parties performed strongly in June European elections, coming out on top in France, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call snap elections which resulted in right-winger Michel Barnier, who has previously called for a moratorium on migration, being named prime minister.

We are witnessing the “continuation of a rightward shift in migration policies in the European Union,” said Jerome Vignon, migration advisor at the Jacques Delors Institute think-tank.

It reflected the rise of far-right parties in the European elections in June, and more recently in the two regional elections in Germany, he said, referring to a “quite clearly protectionist and conservative trend”.

Strong message

“Anti-immigration positions that were previously the preserve of the extreme right are now contaminating centre-right parties, even centre-left parties like the Social Democrats” in Germany, added Florian Trauner, a migration specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking university in Brussels.

While the Labour government in London has ditched its right-wing Conservative predecessor administration’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, there is clearly interest in a deal Italy has struck with Albania to detain and process migrants there.

Within the European Union, Cyprus has suspended the processing of asylum applications from Syrian applicants, while laws have appeared authorising pushbacks at the border in Finland and Lithuania.

Under the pretext of dealing with “emergency” or “crisis” situations, the list of exemptions and deviations from the common rules defined by the European Union continues to grow.

All this flies in the face of the new EU migration pact, agreed only in May and coming into force in 2026.

In the wake of deadly attacks in Mannheim and most recently Solingen blamed on radical Islamists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government also expelled 28 Afghans back to their home country for the first time since the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Such gestures from Germany are all the more symbolic given how the country since World War II has tried to turn itself into a model of integration, taking in a million refugees, mainly Syrians in 2015-2016 and then more than a million Ukrainian exiles since the Russian invasion.

Germany is sending a “strong message” to its own public as well as to its European partners, said Trauner.

The migratory pressure “remains significant” with more than 500,000 asylum applications registered in the European Union for the first six months of the year, he said.

‘Climate on impunity’

Germany, which received about a quarter of them alone, criticises the countries of southern Europe for allowing migrants to circulate without processing their asylum applications, but southern states denounce a lack of solidarity of the rest of Europe.

The moves by Germany were condemned by EU allies including Greece and Poland, but Scholz received the perhaps unwelcome accolade of praise from Hungarian right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Moscow’s closest friend in the European Union, when he declared “welcome to the club”.

The EU Commission’s failure to hold countries to account “only fosters a climate of impunity where unilateral migration policies and practices can proliferate,” said Adriana Tidona, Amnesty International’s Migration Researcher.

But behind the rhetoric, all European states are also aware of the crucial role played by migrants in keeping sectors going including transport and healthcare, as well as the importance of attracting skilled labour.

“Behind the symbolic speeches, European leaders, particularly German ones, remain pragmatic: border controls are targeted,” said Sophie Meiners, a migration researcher with the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Even Meloni’s government has allowed the entry into Italy of 452,000 foreign workers for the period 2023-2025.

“In parallel to this kind of new restrictive measures, they know they need to address skilled labour needs,” she said.