Tag Archives: Migrant Crisis

Where the dead don’t count in Europe’s migration crisis

CATANIA, Italy (Reuters) – Lucky Iz had just turned 15 when he and his friend Godfrey set off to cross the Sahara on a hot August afternoon in 2012. Lucky has still not told Godfrey’s family what happened on the journey towards Europe. This is his account.

The Nigerian boys arrived at the edge of the Sahara with water, biscuits, milk and energy drinks, just as the people-smuggler had instructed them, Lucky recalled. They climbed with 36 others onto the back of a Toyota pickup truck that sped away from Agadez, a city in northern Niger.

Lucky sat atop a pile of supplies, hanging onto a post with his feet dangling over the side. He knew the driver would not stop if anyone fell off. He was parched and hungry. The sand that sprayed up from under the truck’s tires stung his eyes. For three days they drove, stopping occasionally to refuel and drink their water.

On the fourth day, the driver lost his way. His compass had stopped working. Some in the group would never make it out of the desert.

International groups track numbers of migrants who drown crossing the Mediterranean to Europe. Last year an estimated 3,800 people died that way.

But no one counts the dead of the Sahara. This makes it easier for politicians to ignore the lives lost there, humanitarian workers say.

The United Nations refugee agency has no data on how many people die in the desert, according to its North Africa unit. The International Committee of the Red Cross reconnects families, but does not collect information about their dead. A handful of unofficial databases maintained by volunteers, academics and non-governmental organizations have tried to keep count, but they depend largely on media reports, and their funding is sporadic.

“We don’t have any data,” said Julien Brachet, a fellow at Oxford’s International Migration Institute who has been doing field work in the Sahara, including northern Niger, for more than a decade.

“It’s a problem, because there may be as many people dying in the desert as there are in the Mediterranean,” he said. “We can’t prove it, so we can’t say it, so nobody is going to intervene.”

LOST

Agadez has long been a gateway to the desert. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that 120,000 migrants passed through the city on their way to North Africa or Europe in 2015, more than twice as many as the previous year. In the past, people would leave the city openly. Weekly military convoys offered some protection.

But since a tragedy in 2013, when 92 desert travelers died of thirst, the government has moved to shut down the routes, and the traffic has become more secretive and hidden.

Lost in the sands, the driver of Lucky’s truck kept going for five more days, hoping to reach a landmark and reorient himself. By then, Lucky said, all the food and water was gone. Exhausted passengers began to fall off the truck at night. The driver did not stop for them.

“The next day, we see ourselves, and we count ourselves and some people are not there anymore,” said Lucky, now 18, who after arriving in Europe lived for a year in a young people’s refuge in Catania, Italy.

A day later, the vehicle ran out of fuel. Helpless, the travelers milled about. That afternoon, a sandstorm barreled towards them.

“We were just standing, looking. We don’t even know where to go,” said Lucky. “We don’t even know how we can go out from the desert. So many people died on that spot.

“My friend fell down and died,” Lucky said. Everyone was crying.

“We didn’t know who was going to die next. We don’t know who is going to give up next. So what do you do? The whole place was sand, so we had to dig out the sand with our hands and we buried him.

“Then we started walking.”

UNDER COVER

The Sahara in northern Niger and neighboring Mali is home to drugs and arms traffickers, people-smugglers, kidnappers and armed Islamist militant groups, some of them linked to al Qaeda.

The European Union has put Niger and other countries under pressure to crack down on smuggling. In 2014, the EU opened a mission in Niger to train the security forces to “help prevent irregular migration.” Last year, Niger passed a law banning people-smuggling that could see smugglers jailed for up to 30 years.

But Brachet says that may have been counter-productive because it pushed much of the trade underground.

“It used to be, not impossible, but very difficult for somebody to abandon migrants in the middle of the desert,” said Brachet. “Now, as it’s clandestine, nobody knows if you really reach the point where you were supposed to drop your passengers off or not, or if you left them in the desert.”

An EU official said it is a priority to tackle people-smugglers and others who put the lives of vulnerable migrants at risk: The bloc does not control borders or patrol in the desert, but supports the authorities with training and advice.

The IOM, which has staff in northern Niger, is trying to gather better information about how many people move through the region, and what happens to them. It estimates that some 2,300 people pass through Agadez each week. But it recorded only 37 deaths in the Sahara in 2015.

Last March, IOM staff visited Seguidine, a small village in Niger close to the Libyan border. In one day they found 85 migrants stranded, waiting under trees, abandoned by smugglers, said Giuseppe Loprete, head of the group’s mission in Niger.

“The journey is very difficult,” said Loprete. “From what they tell us, the stories, a lot of people die on the route.”

The government of Niger did not respond to requests for comment.

Lucky said he and the other survivors walked for about 10 hours before they ran into a pickup truck on its way back to Agadez. They pleaded with the driver to take them the rest of the way.

He drove them to Sabha in Libya and sold them to militants who forced Lucky to work for free. It would be months before he could escape and make his way to Italy.

They left behind four men and two women in the sand – six more deaths that were never recorded.

(Gebrekidan reported from Catania, Martell from New York; Additional reporting by Masako Melissa Hirsch in New York, Gabriela Baczynska in Brussels and Abdoulaye Massalaki in Niamey; Edited by Sara Ledwith)

Greece rages at neighbors amid fears migrants could be halted

ATHENS (Reuters) – Greece raged at neighbors and began bussing hundreds of migrants back from its northern border on Tuesday, fearing it could be inundated with migrants halted by Balkan states trying to shut the main land route to Western Europe.

Athens filed a rare diplomatic protest with fellow EU member Austria for excluding Greek officials from a high-level meeting on measures aimed at curbing Europe’s biggest inward migration since World War Two.

More than a million migrants and refugees passed through Greece last year, and nearly 100,000 have already arrived this year. Nearly all reached Greece by sea and travelled onward by land over the Balkan peninsula to richer EU countries further north and west, above all Germany.

But several of the countries along that route have been taking measures to close their frontiers, prompting those further down the chain to impose similar restrictions to prevent a bottleneck.

Greek police removed migrants from the Greek-Macedonian border on Tuesday after additional passage restrictions imposed by Macedonian authorities left hundreds of people, mainly Afghans, stuck at the border.

About 450 of them were loaded onto buses to be taken to reception centres in Athens, joining hundreds more fresh arrivals from outlying Greek islands who arrived on the Greek mainland on Tuesday morning.

“I will continue on to Macedonia,” said Abdulah Farash, 21, a student from Syria. “My friend and I want to go on to Germany… it was important to reach Greece through Izmir,” he said of a Turkish Aegean port where many migrants set off for the passage to Greece. “Then things are easy.”

At the border with Macedonia on Monday, witnesses said Syrian refugees who did not have all travel documents, including passports, were turned back.

European countries are trying to slow the migration wave, which includes hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria and other war zones, as well as large numbers of other migrants from north Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East.

Austria is due to host west Balkan states on Wednesday to discuss efforts to manage and curb the flow, but did not invite Greece. In unusually heated language that shows how the migration crisis has raised passions across Europe, Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias described the snub as a “unilateral and non-friendly act”.

“The exclusion of our country at this meeting is seen as a non-friendly act since it gives the impression that some, in our absence, are expediting decisions which directly concern us.”

Greece also accused its old foe Turkey of trying to “blow apart” an agreement that NATO would help patrol the porous sea border between Greece and Turkey to clamp down on human trafficking.

Turkey, which is hosting 2.5 million Syrian refugees, the largest refugee population on earth, says it is trying to stop them from sailing for Greece but needs more aid.

FINANCIAL CRISIS

Greece, still labouring under a financial crisis that has wrecked living standards at home, says it would not be able to cope with the influx on its own, if the onward passage of migrants through the Balkans is halted.

It says it cannot turn back thousands of people arriving on its shores daily in inflatable dinghies, citing international conventions.

Austria, the last country on the overland route to Germany, said last week it had imposed a daily limit of 3,200 migrants passing through, and 80 asylum claims.

Further down, Hungary has said it would shut three railway crossings with Croatia used by migrants, effective Feb. 22. Slovenia has erected a fence on its southern border with Croatia to ensure that migrants can enter only through official border crossings.

“The Balkan route was a humanitarian corridor. It could close after consultations and not by turning one country against the other,” Greek Migration Minister Yannis Mouzalas told Skai TV. “We are faced with an action that has elements of a coup.”

Vienna denied it had snubbed Athens by excluding it from Wednesday’s talks. The meeting of West Balkan nations was an established format which had first convened in Austria last year to discuss the issue of Islamist militants, a foreign ministry spokesman said.

The meeting includes interior and foreign ministers from Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia.

(Additional reporting by Alexandros Avramidis, Alkis Konstantinidis, Lefteris Karagianopoulos, Renee Maltezou and George Georgiopoulos in Athens and Francois Murphy in Vienna; writing by Michele Kambas)

Frontex: 68K migrants arrive in Europe last month, 38 times last January’s rate

Cold weather and rough seas did not deter the approximately 68,000 migrants who arrived in Greece last month, the European Union’s border protection agency announced Monday.

That number was 38 times higher than the number of migrants who made it to Greece last January, Frontex said in a news release, at the start of what was a record year for displacement.

Frontex has said more than 1 million migrants arrived in the European Union last year, nearly five times the 2014 total. Monthly arrivals topped 100,000 in July and remained at six-figure levels through December as refugees fled conflict-torn nations in the Middle East and Africa.

The U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) says another 35,000 migrants traveled to Greece and Italy by sea during the first three weeks of February, bringing this year’s total arrivals above 100,000.

Only 13,000 people arrived in Greece and Italy in the first two months of 2015, the UNHCR said.

Frontex tried to place a positive spin on the migrant numbers released Monday, saying they represented a roughly 40 percent monthly drop from the 108,000 who arrived in Greece last December. The agency said winter weather contributed to the month-over-month decline.

But those who did arrive still added to a growing list of migrants who are seeking better lives in Europe, as nations face growing pressure as to how to cope with the massive inflow of people.

The vast majority of them arrive in Greece, the International Office for Migration (IOM) has said, as they are often shuttled on packed, unsafe boats across the Aegean Sea from Turkey.

Most of the migrants who arrived in Greece are from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, Frontex said.

Others arrive in Italy, a destination for sea routes that depart from Tunisia, Libya and Egypt.

Most of the migrants who arrived in Italy last month were from Nigeria, Frontex said.

The African nation is home to Boko Haram, which last year’s Global Terrorism Index dubbed the world’s deadliest terror group, and Fulani militants who have become increasingly deadly.

However, the migrants who are choosing to make the journey are also encountering some risks.

On Friday, The IOM, UNHCR and United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund on Friday warned of the increasing number of migrants who have drowned on their journeys to Europe.

Thousands of migrants trapped in Greece as neighbors tighten restrictions

ATHENS (Reuters) – Thousands of migrants were stranded in northern Greece on Monday after neighboring Macedonia demanded additional identification from people seeking to cross the border and head to Western Europe, witnesses said.

European leaders are concerned that migrants passing through austerity-hit Greece to more prosperous countries could end up stranded if Greece’s northern neighbors tighten border controls.

Greek officials say the flow of people across the border slowed after Macedonia demanded additional identification from people seeking passage.

About 5,000 people massed at two locations in northern Greece, close to the border with Macedonia, while aid groups urged another 4,000, who arrived on the Greek mainland from outlying islands, not to head to north for fear of creating a bottleneck.

“Our biggest fear is that the 4,000 migrants who are in Athens head up here and the place will become overcrowded,” said Antonis Rigas, a coordinator of the medical relief charity Medicins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders).

Balkan states straddling the migrant route to western and northern Europe have begun denying passage to individuals not coming from the conflict regions of Syria and Iraq.

One migrant in his mid-30s, who said he was from the Syrian town of Aleppo, said Macedonian police did not let him cross the border because he did not have a passport.

“I lost everything in the war, I have no documents,” he said, declining to give his name. He said he had obtained Greek registration papers at the island of Lesbos.

Macedonia has erected a metal fence topped with razor wire at the main crossing point for migrants along its southern border with Greece.

Greek migration minister Yannis Mouzalas criticized his neighbors for shirking their responsibilities amid the crisis.

“Not only have Visegrad countries not taken in one refugee, they didn’t even send a blanket or a tent,” he told the TV channel of Greece’s parliament, referring to the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia.

They had not sent a ‘single policeman’ to reinforce the EU border agency Frontex either, he said.

Austria has invited Balkan states to a meeting on migration in Vienna on Feb. 24, a day before EU interior ministers are due to meet on the migrant crisis.

Vienna has angered other EU members by imposing a cap on asylum claims, limiting the number of migrants permitted into its territory to 3,200 per day, and introducing a daily cap of 80 asylum claims.

Its interior minister has said Austria could impose even stricter controls, a move that could trigger other countries north of Greece to do the same.

(Additional reporting by Fedja Grulovic; writing by Michele Kambas; editing by Katharine Houreld)

Austria takes migrant fingerprints on the border, then discards them

SPIELFELD, Austria/BRUSSELS (Reuters) – On the Austrian-Slovenia border, one of the last stops on the migrant route to Germany, a policeman explains that after his 12-hour shift taking new arrivals’ fingerprints, most are lost minutes after they are taken.

“We are not allowed to save the fingerprints,” the Austrian policeman, who wanted to remain anonymous, said as he sat in a tent at the Spielfeld border crossing. “We do what we’re asked to do.”

Austria, which saw 700,000 migrants crossing its borders last year, says it is not legally allowed to save and share with other European states more than 90 percent of the fingerprint data it takes of migrants fleeing war and poverty, a potential security problem at a major migrant hub.

It is only required to upload onto Europe’s shared fingerprint database, Eurodac, the data of those who actually apply for asylum in the country, which is less than 10 percent of those crossing into Austria.

So Austria takes digital fingerprints of everyone entering the country, checks whether they have a criminal record, but does not save the data if they want to move on to Germany, which most do.

Roz, a 28-year old Syrian mother of two, is surprised to hear that her family’s fingerprints are neither saved nor shared.

“They need to know who we are. If you record fingerprints of refugees, it guarantees security in this country,” she said as she was shown by Austrian officials onto a bus that would take her to the German border, her chosen destination.

ANACHRONISM

The situation highlights how European laws are far behind the challenges of the continent’s latest crisis, one that has already seen hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees, mainly from Syria, flooding into the continent seeking a new life.

“That is a major problem, we have no records on these people, there are so many moving around the bloc and we have no trace of them whatsoever,” said one diplomat in Brussels, adding that some EU countries have tried to push for changes but they were blocked due to privacy protection concerns.

Berndt Koerner, deputy executive director of Europe’s border agency Frontex, said he was confronted with an “anachronism” in the sharing of migrant data.

“We are currently confronted with the problem that we cannot access certain databases, which can be used nationally in border controls,” Koerner told reporters this month.

The system was not changed even after the evident security problems in tracing the movements of the surviving Islamist militants involved in the Paris attacks last November.

Only states on the EU’s external borders, such as Greece and Italy, must save and share all fingerprint data.

Still, at a West Balkans summit in October all participants, including Austria, committed to registering, fingerprinting and uploading onto Eurodac all migrant data even on borders in the no-visa and border-control free Schengen zone.

Croatia and Finland, for example, save fingerprints of all migrants who arrive there, while Germany only lets in migrants who state they want to apply for asylum there.

Austria’s coalition of the social-democrat SPO and Christian-conservative OVP has come under pressure in opinion polls from their right-wing, anti-Islam Freedom Party rivals since the latest migrant wave arrived last autumn.

Drawing ire from Brussels and accusations it was breaking EU law, Vienna this month introduced daily caps on how many entries it allows across its southern borders and the number of asylum requests it will accept.

But even as the coalition seems to attempt to coax back voters worried about migration, the two parties publicly blame one another for failing to create the legal grounds to save the fingerprints as talks began on how to amend the border law.

(Additional reporting by Francois Murphy, Igor Ilic, Tuomas Forsell, Tina Bellon Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)

More children, migrants drowning while trying to cross Mediterranean

More than 340 children have died while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea in the past five and a half months, three agencies announced Friday, saying the death toll continues to climb.

The actual number of drownings could be higher, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and the U.N. Refugee Agency said in a joint statement, because authorities may not have been able to recover every child’s body.

Still, the agencies said the current number of deaths equates to an average of two children per day since September 2015, as more migrant families try to reach Europe in search of better lives.

The U.N. Refugee Agency has said that more than 1 million migrants and refugees traveled to Europe by sea alone last year, most of them fleeing war-torn countries. More than 3,700 died.

In Friday’s announcement, the three agencies said migrants often travel in overloaded, poor-quality boats that place them at a higher risk of capsizing, particularly in rough seas.

“Clearly, more efforts are needed to combat smuggling and trafficking,” U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said in a statement.

The IOM says 90,756 adults and children have traveled across water to Italy and Greece during the first 49 days of 2016, and 411 of them have died. Some 7,461 have died since January 2014.

The agencies called for actions to ensure migrants travel safely, noting that many of them are currently trying to join relatives in Europe. They said some 36 percent of migrants are children.

“This is not only a Mediterranean problem, or even a European one,” IOM Director General William Lacy Swing said in a statement. “It is a humanitarian catastrophe in the making that demands the entire world’s engagement.”

Canada divided as 25,000 Syrian refugees settle in

TORONTO (Reuters) – Canadians remain divided about the resettlement of Syrian refugees, with some saying Canada should accept more despite a series of racist incidents that have marred a mostly smooth arrival of nearly 25,000 migrants, a poll showed on Friday.

Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was elected in October on a promise to accept more Syrian refugees more quickly than the previous Conservative government had allowed, but the original deadline for accepting 25,000 by the end of 2015 proved too ambitious and the timeline was extended by two months.

During his election campaign, Trudeau said a Liberal government would work with private sponsors to accept “even more” than the immediate goal of 25,000, and Immigration Minister John McCallum said in December the government could double the intake to 50,000 by the end of 2016.

A poll by the Angus Reid Institute released on Friday showed 52 percent of Canadians support the plan to resettle 25,000 refugees before the end of February, while 44 percent opposed the program.

The poll also showed that 42 percent of respondents want Canada to stop taking in Syrian refugees, while 29 percent said Canada should stop at 25,000 and 29 percent said the country should accept even more.

Some 21,672 Syrian refugees – sponsored by both private citizens and the government – have arrived in Canada since November, dispersing into more than 200 communities, according to the Immigration Department.

While the arrival has been smooth for privately sponsored refugees supported by families or community groups, hundreds of government-sponsored refugees have struggled to find housing and remain in hotels in Toronto, where the housing market is tight and expensive.

There has also been a scattering of racist incidents, including one last week in which graffiti was sprayed on a school in the western Canadian city of Calgary urging “Syrians go home and die” and “kill the traitor Trudeau.”

The prime minister responded on Twitter: “Canadians have shown the best of our country in welcoming refugees. That spirit won’t be diminished by fear and hate.”

In January, a group of Syrian refugees were pepper-sprayed by a cyclist in Vancouver, an attack Trudeau also condemned on Twitter.

(Reporting by Andrea Hopkins; Editing by Sandra Maler)

Austria sticks to migration cap despite EU legal warning

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Austria said on Thursday it would go ahead with introducing daily caps on migrants despite warnings from Brussels that the move broke European Union rules, which have already been badly stretched by the migration crisis engulfing the bloc.

Vienna announced it would let in no more than 3,200 people and cap asylum claims at 80 per day from Friday as it tries to cut immigration, drawing criticism from the European Union’s migration chief.

“Politically I say we’ll stick with it … it is unthinkable for Austria to take on the asylum seekers for the whole of Europe,” Austria’s Chancellor Werner Faymann said on arriving at an EU leaders’ summit in Brussels.

Around 700,000 migrants entered Austria last year and about 90,000 applied for asylum in the country sitting on the migrant route from Turkey via Greece and the Balkans to Germany.

“After 100,000 refugees, we can’t tell the Austrian people that it will just continue like this. That’s why I tell the EU: we set a good example but to think that you don’t have to do anything, then I have to say it is time for the EU to act,” Faymann said.

Austria is the latest EU state to resort to its own measures to curb migration and try control the flows as the 28-nation bloc has all but failed to implement a joint response to its worst migration crisis in decades.

“It is true that Austria is under huge pressure,” European Union Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos told Reuters earlier on Thursday. “It is true they are overwhelmed. But, on the other hand, there are some principles and laws that all countries must respect and apply.”

Avramopoulos sent a letter to Austria’s Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner on Thursday, urging Vienna to reconsider the move as it was against EU laws.

“The Austrians are obliged to accept asylum applications without putting a cap,” Avramopoulos said.

But Faymann blamed the failure of the European migration and refugee policies, saying the bloc’s relocation plan to ease the burden on most-affected countries was not working and criticizing central-eastern EU members who have stalled it.

The migration crisis, which saw more than a million people reach Europe last year, opened deep rifts between EU states, which are trading blame and increasingly resorting to ad-hoc national solutions despite Brussels calls to prevent them.

Faymann backed Merkel in pushing for more cooperation with Turkey to get Ankara to curb the number of migrants and refugees who embark from its shores toward Europe.

Germany and Austria are among 11 EU states that were due to meet Turkey separately before the summit of all 28 EU leaders to discuss taking in more people directly from Turkey to discourage perilous journeys across the Mediterranean.

“Every agreement between Turkey and Greece to protect the common border and make legal immigration possible, every advance and may it be ever so mediocre, would be necessary and right,” Faymann said, adding he would seek a new meeting with Turkey after the Thursday one was canceled over a bombing in Ankara.

(Additional reporting by Shadia Nasralla and Francois Murphy in Vienna; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

EU ‘silent’ on migrant rights abuses in Turkey, rapporteur says

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Anxiety about refugees streaming to its shores has led the European Union to turn an apparent blind eye to rights abuses in Turkey, whose help the EU needs to reduce the migrant influx, the European Parliament’s rapporteur on Turkey said on Tuesday.

The number of Syrian war refugees in neighboring Turkey has swelled to 2.6 million and the EU has promised Ankara 3 billion euros to help it cope with them in the hope this will dissuade many from making onward journeys to Europe.

EU officials have also voiced renewed support for Turkey’s long-held aspiration of joining the 28-nation bloc if it does more to stem the outflow of migrants to Europe.

The European Parliament’s rapporteur on Turkey said the delay of a European Commission progress report on Ankara’s EU qualifications until after the November 2015 election, won by the party that backs President Tayyip Erdogan, suggested the bloc was staying “silent” in the face of a deteriorating rights record in Turkey.

Turkish security-force operations against Kurdish militants in southeast Turkey since July have killed at least 160 civilians, according to rights groups. Journalists and academics critical of the government’s policies have been detained.

“The (EU) accession process … should be connected to democratic reforms or rule of law or what’s happening with the Kurdish question,” rapporteur Kati Piri told Reuters. “The European Union gave a pretty bad signal by connecting it so directly to migration.”

Ankara’s peace talks with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) collapsed in July, ending a ceasefire. Some 400,000 people have been displaced since the conflict reignited, Piri said in the telephone interview.

“If the EU does not engage actively in calling for an immediate ceasefire and the peace process to be resumed, we could face another refugee inflow, and this time it will be coming from Turkey,” she told reporters in Brussels, presenting the draft report that will be voted on by European lawmakers.

STEPS TO CURB FLOW

More than 1 million migrants reached Europe via illegal routes in 2015, and another million will seek to do so in 2016, according to the International Organization for Migration and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Turkey has yet to receive any of the 3 billion euros of EU aid, but Piri said the government had boosted efforts to stop refugees, including blocking Syrians coming from Jordan and Lebanon and breaking up people-smuggling rings.

But it will have to lift its geographical limitation on accepting refugees in order to meet EU criteria, she said.

Turkey only considers those fleeing Europe to be refugees, although there has been no such migration for decades, and gives those from other regions only limited rights to live and work.

“This will be a very important point in the coming months. It is one of the conditions Turkey needs to fulfill for visa liberalization with the EU. This could be a huge step forward for improving the lives of asylum seekers in Turkey,” said Piri.

Turkey opened membership talks with the EU in 2005 but the slow pace of reforms there, a dispute over the divided island of Cyprus and worries in Europe about taking in a country with a large Muslim population has stalled its accession bid.

(Additional reporting by Francesco Guarascio in Brussels; Editing by Nick Tattersall and Mark Heinrich)

Not in my backyard? Mainstream Scandinavia warily eyes record immigration

OSLO-STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Norwegian officials called the school guards “extra supervision”. Critics said the plan to post security personnel near an Oslo school in case of assaults by newly arrived refugees was an ugly euphemism for intolerance.

Across the border in the far northern Swedish town of Kalix, a traditional bastion of center-left politics, over 100 residents signed a petition against plans to turn a 19th century country house into a reception center for unaccompanied minors.

The debate among these liberal Scandinavian stalwarts would have been unheard of a year ago, underscoring how concern about a record influx of immigrants is percolating into the Nordics’ mainstream from the populist fringes.

Anti-immigrant, populist parties have gained support since some 250,000 refugees entered the Nordics last year. A record 163,000 refugees arrived in Sweden and the far right is vying for top spot in polls. In Denmark, the anti-immigration Danish People’s Party is the second largest in parliament.

But it is a backlash among the mainstream that may be the biggest change. There are signs that voters may be broadly supportive of immigrants but not in their own backyard. From welfare cuts to new ID checks, it is a trend that shows the limits of even some of Europe’s most open societies, and may represent a sea change for politics in Scandinavia.

“It’s a big change happening close to us. In all neighborhoods there are concerns,” said Pia Almvang, head of the parents’ association at Lysaker primary school in a leafy well-to-do area of villas near Oslo, cut through by a motorway with cheaper four-storey blocks of flats built alongside.

“The parents just want to look after their kids.”

The town council agreed to parents’ requests for extra security by a motorway underpass near a refugee center for 600 people that opened this month. After criticisms of “asylum guards” the proposal was withdrawn, but it had already polarized this middle class community.

A February survey showed immigration as the main concern for 40 percent of Swedes, easily trumping worries over failing schools, joblessness and welfare. The change over half a year was the biggest opinion swing in the poll’s history.

From taking in Vietnam draft dodgers in the 1960s to Balkans war refugees in the 1990s, Sweden has been proud of its open door policy for decades. Norway has been among the leaders in helping refugees worldwide with aid.

While the asylum situation has led to an outpouring of support from many Swedes – charities reported record donations last year – it has also led others to worry about the effect on schools, crime and the country’s welfare state.

TENSION AT HOME

In Kalix, hit by a decline in the paper industry but still a bastion of Social Democrat support, residents have petitioned the council to abandon plans for a center for around 30 unaccompanied children.

“I have a big heart and I believe we have to help, so it’s not about that, but enough is enough,” said Anne-Maj Ostlund, a 75-year-old retired school teacher who lives close to the yellow-painted wooden villa in Kalix, being used as a hostel

“I have lived in heaven here … it is peaceful,” said Ostlund, who has lived in the same house since 1948. “What is going to be left?”

Middle class neighborhoods in Stockholm and Gothenburg have seen meetings where furious citizens have questioned politicians over refugees’ housing.

Police were called to one meeting in Haninge, near Stockholm, where the local authority had gathered residents and parents of pupils at a nearby school to inform them about plans for a center for unaccompanied minors.

Council workers were met by shouts of “they are going to rape our children,” and “who will take responsibility when someone dies”.

Mainstream parties in Sweden are now proposing measures against immigration that were only the ground of the far right a few years ago. Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, who once told crowds that “My Europe does not build walls”, tightened asylum rules and border controls with ID checks.

In Denmark a bill tightening immigration laws, including the confiscation of refugees’ valuables, passed with overwhelming support including the center-left Social Democrats.

Sweden’s Moderate Party, the biggest of the center-right opposition, wants to limit asylum seekers’ access to welfare.

It was a sign of the times that when Sweden’s center left interior minister said the government would deport 80,000 immigrants this year, former Foreign Minister Carl Bildt tweeted the “probable aim is to send a signal that new ones are not welcome.”

The concerns are not just related to security but that the Nordic state is under threat from the high fiscal cost of newcomers and the sense that civic trust which underpins a culture of high taxes is being eroded.

Nordic nations have the highest percentage of people agreeing that “most people can be trusted” when asked in international surveys, helping drive a consensus for high taxes and extensive welfare.

“The Nordic welfare state works due to trust. You have to trust that people work and pay taxes when they are able to do so,” said Gert Tinggaard, professor of political science at Denmark’s Aarhus University.

“The second condition is that you also have to trust the politicians,” he added. “You get a bang for your buck.”

The IMF estimates that Sweden will spend 1.0 percent of its gross domestic product on asylum seekers in 2016, by far the highest of 19 European nations surveyed.

Last year, Sweden had to find an extra 70,000 school places due to asylum seekers, on top of 100,000 pupils that normally enter the school system for the first time in any given year.

In a country where speaking out against immigration is still taboo for many, Scandinavians privately voice concerns about signs of crowded emergency rooms and larger school classes. Newspapers are increasingly full of reports of money being spent on refugees and reports of crime involving asylum seekers, although crime figures do not bear out these concerns.

Lofven – who admits Sweden faces increased polarization – has seen his government’s support fall to record lows in polls due to a sense his government is helpless to stop a migrant influx.

For Ylva Johansson, Swedish minister for employment and integration issues, the problem is that thousands of refugees, many young men, are not integrated into the workforce, instead languishing in asylum centers in villages and towns.

“Most Swedes are not racist,” she said. “But when there is this special asylum housing when they cannot work, and cannot be part of society this is really a tension.

“This is a dangerous situation,” she added. “We have a lot of people in no man’s land .. living outside society.”

(Additional reporting by Daniel Dickson and Johan Ahlander in Stockholm, Sabina Zawadzki in Copenhagen; Writing by Alistair Scrutton; Editing by Janet McBride)