Stockholm – Sweden’s Interior Minister, Anders Ygeman, said on Thursday that the European country could deport up to 80,000 asylum-seekers in the next years. According to a report from the Swedish newspaper Dagens Industri, 45 percent of asylum applications from 2015 are likely to be rejected.
“Otherwise, we would basically have free immigration and we can’t manage that,” Migration Minister Morgan Johansson said.
Last year, approximately 163,000 migrants requested asylum in Sweden. Anders Ygeman explained that the country must prepare to deny the Sweden citizenship to a significant number of asylum-seekers. When analyzing the proportion of refugees per capita, Sweden ranks as one of the main refugee-receiving European countries.
“We are talking about 60,000 people but the number could climb to 80,000,” said Swedish Interior Minister Anders Ygeman according to Agence France Presse. “The initial action is to get to a voluntary return and create the conditions for deportation. But we cannot stay there, we need a return by means of coercion,” he added.
Victor Harju, a spokesman from Interior Minister Anders Ygeman, confirmed later that the announcements refer to the rate of approval for asylum seekers that traveled to Sweden in 2015. He also added that the rate could “of course change.” By 2016, there are about 9.7 million people living in Sweden, most of them in large cities such as Stockholm, which has more than 850,000 inhabitants.
It would be important to analyze the European country in context to understand the impact that massive migration could have on it. In 2015, Sweden classified as the second country with the most advanced social progress index, after Norway. Analysts highlighted the quality of water and sanitation from the country, the access that people have to basic knowledge and the personal freedom and choice that its citizens enjoy.
In November last year, Sweden’s prime minister said in an interview to the Financial Times, that the EU needed to address the migration crisis together and that just two or three countries could not give refuge to most asylum seekers. He also added that he thinks Muslims are not part of the European values.
According to numbers published by the UN Refugee Agency, Europe is currently living the worst migration crisis registered since World War II. By January 25, more than 45,000 migrants and refugees had arrived in Greece by sea, which presents a surprise when comparing records from January 2014, when just 1,472 people were received by the Greek Coast Guard.
When counting other countries such as Germany, the old continent received 856,723 people who arrived by boats in 2015, most of them (90 percent), coming from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, said the International Organization for Migration. In 2016, 177 people have died in the Aegean sea when trying to migrate to Europe.
Source: Washington Post