VIENNA — 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.
“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.
Her hard line underscored Austria’s defiance of EU criticism and concern about the thousands of asylum-seekers that have pushed daily against the country’s southern border.
Austria is dealing with more than 90,000 applications for asylum — the second highest number in the EU proportionate to the country’s population. Its immigration problems are minor, however, compared with fellow EU member Greece, which has seen more than 102,500 people cross the sea to its islands so far this year. More than 1 million people reached Europe last year — more than 80 percent of them landing in Greece first.
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.
Greece, which was not invited, was highly critical of the gathering attended by interior and foreign ministers of the participating nations.
“Our country’s non-invitation to this meeting is perceived as a non-friendly act, as it creates the impression that some, in our absence, want to initiate decisions that affect us directly,” Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias said. “(This is) yet another extra-institutional initiative that violates the letter and the spirit of the treaties of the European Union and international law on refugees.”
Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz told reporters the Greeks “are only interested in transporting the refugees as fast as possible to central Europe.”
Athens objects to what it sees as Austrian-led attempts to leave it to handle the burden of those arriving alone, while the EU says Austrian caps on refugee numbers are illegal.
Germany — the economic powerhouse of the 28-nation EU and the destination for many of the people crossing Europe — is sending conflicting signals on the subject.
Its interior minister says in the long term his country won’t put up with other nations simply waving migrants through to Germany, and is objecting to the number that neighboring Austria is allowing to transit.
But German Chancellor Angela Merkel remains focused not on border controls but on Turkey, from where hundreds of thousands have crossed to Greece, as key to resolving Europe’s immigration crisis.
Mikl-Leitner shrugged off the concerns from Greece and the EU. She told reporters Austria is still in favor of a common EU solution to the migrant problem but the EU needs short-term “national measures” in the interim to stanch the flow.
“It is important and necessary to stop the flow of migration along the Balkans,” she told reporters. “We need measures that can be implemented together with the Balkan states.”
Along with Austria, countries on the migrant route to western Europe already have introduced stricter transit rules in the past weeks. Greece’s migration minister said he expects the number of stranded immigrants in his country to reach “tens of thousands” because of those moves.
Minister Ioannis Mouzalas said the Greek government was looking at additional sites to set up temporary transit camps by the end of the week.
“It’s not something we can do in one or two days, but we are trying to keep people in humane conditions,” he said.
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.
Increasing his opposition to the plan Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Wednesday called for a national referendum on the EU plan for a mandatory resettlement quota.
