The recent sharp drop in asylum seekers in mid-December and early January is a development Austria’s conservative interior minister attributes to Serbia restricting travel for Indians and Tunisians.
At their peak, some 1,000 Indian citizens applied for asylum in Austria per week. Now, that figure is down to 300. A similar development could be observed for Tunisian citizens, the interior ministry stated.
“Due to the strong decrease in Tunisian and Indian asylum seekers, the asylum brake shows a first effect,” Austrian Interior Minister Gerhard Karner from Lower Austria explained on Sunday.
Faced with pressure from EU countries, Belgrade restricted travel from 1 January for Indian and Tunisian citizens who were previously able to travel to Serbia without a visa. The Austrian government has been quick to tout this as a success of their engagement.
“The end of visa-free entry for Indian and Tunisian citizens is an important measure to limit the scope of action of organised crime – the trafficking mafia,” Karner stressed. The interior ministry stressed that winter and lower temperatures could not explain the difference.
Mid-November, Austria signed a memorandum of understanding with Serbia and Hungary on pushing back irregular migrants from external borders after the country registered some 100,000 non-Ukrainian asylum seekers – and arrested 687 traffickers – in 2022, a record figure.
Banking on strict migration policy, the conservative People’s Party ÖVP is hoping to maintain momentum for the upcoming elections on 29 January in the country’s largest single state of Lower Austria – the heartland of the conservatives in which the party is currently polling at 40%.
(Nikolaus J. Kurmayer | EURACTIV.de)
Source: euractiv.com
