Hundreds of young asylum seekers choose to disappear in Switzerland

More than 500 underage asylum seekers went missing in Switzerland in 2016, a huge rise on the previous year’s tally of 94, according to official statistics reported by RTS.

Published: 26 September 2017 10:46 CEST

Hundreds of young asylum seekers choose to disappear in Switzerland

File photo: lighthouse/Depositphotos

In total, around 5,000 unaccompanied migrants aged under 18 at the time of arrival currently live in Switzerland, said the broadcaster, quoting the Swiss migration office (SEM).

However after saying they want to claim asylum, many then flee the official reception centres and disappear from the authorities’ radar.

In total 539 young migrants went missing in 2016 – a figure that includes 81 who were aged over 18 but who are counted as minors because they claimed asylum when they were under 18.

The vast majority – 324 – were aged 16-17, while 134 were in the age bracket 6-15.

So far this year 310 minors have dropped off the SEM’s radar.

Speaking to the broadcaster, Valentina Darbellay of Swiss child aid agency Terre des hommes said many of these young people risked ending up victims of trafficking or as delinquents.

Reporting practices vary from canton to canton, meaning young migrants are not always reported missing as non-migrant children would be, she said, adding that this discrimination was “shocking”.

Lukas Rieder, a spokesman for the SEM, recognized that young migrants going missing was a problem, but said the elevated numbers last year were proportional to the number of young asylum seekers now living in Switzerland.

The SEM intends to work with the canton of “harmonize” practices across the country, he told RTS.

The issue does not only concern the underage.

Last September the SEM confirmed that in the previous three months between 20 and 40 percent of asylum seekers had fled reception centres after claiming asylum.

A report in the media suggested that in some areas of the country up to 90 percent of asylum seekers flee while awaiting the outcome of their application.

The SEM said at the time that most of those who disappear from Swiss reception centres are thought to be heading for Germany.

As a result, there's nothing to suggest that there are more illegals living in Switzerland.

Under the rules of the Dublin agreement, refugees are only allowed to enter Switzerland if they say they want to claim asylum here.

Anyone who does not state their intention to claim asylum in Switzerland is refused entry and must return to the first European country they entered.

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.