Government ministers from Austria and Balkan nations along the migrant route toward Western Europe declared Wednesday that an eventual complete stop to the influx of people overwhelming the continent is inevitable due to security and other concerns, reports Associated Press.
“It is not possible to process unlimited numbers of migrants and applicants for asylum,” said a declaration issued by a meeting of EU members Austria, Slovenia, Croatia and Bulgaria, as well as Albania Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. It cited “limited resources and reception capacities, potential consequences for internal security and social cohesion as well as challenges with regard to integration.”
At the same time, the document focused mostly on reducing the inflow of people — some fleeing war and persecution, others economic hardship — rather than totally cutting off the migrant flow into Austria, and from there to the rest of Western Europe.
Noting that the right to asylum does not include choosing “a country of preference,” the document calls for common standards of registration and entry criteria for those with realistic chances for asylum.
“The migration flow along the Western Balkans route needs to be substantially reduced,” says the 19-point document. It declares that all nations at the conference will refuse entry to all “without travel documents, with forged or falsified documents or migrants making wrongful statements about their nationality or identity.
It urges all EU nations that have signed on to the Schengen agreement on open borders to refuse entry both to those who do not satisfy the entry conditions and to those who do but do not use the opportunity to apply for asylum.
Foreshadowing the declaration’s contents as she convened the meeting, Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner said her country wants not only to crimp the immigrant influx but to put a full stop to it.
Austria is dealing with more than 90,000 applications for asylum — the second highest number in the EU proportionate to the country’s population. Austria has recently capped the number of asylum-seekers it will accept daily at its borders to 80, and limited the number of refugees it will let pass through the country. That creates a bottleneck of refugees that is hurting nations further south, including EU member Greece, the first point of landing for most of the migrants arriving by boat from Turkey.
The EU has set up a scheme to share 160,000 migrants arriving in Greece and Italy. Even that would be only a fraction of the total numbers, but so far, barely 600 people have been relocated, and only some EU partners have offered places for them — fewer than 5,000 spots in all.
