Banned in Schengen, after Austria gives a harsh verdict: Romanians, more dangerous than Afghans!

Austrian Interior Minister Gerhard Karner hailed 2023 as “the year of deportations”. The opposition meanwhile accused him of misleading the public.

The minister showed that while 531 Romanians were deported, 30 Syrians were deported, and only 5 Afghans

On closer inspection, he’s right: asylum seekers from the usual countries of origin (Afghanistan, Syria) have hardly been deported. The “path of a strict asylum policy” is not recognized.

12,900 people were expelled last year, which is not true. More than half of these – 6,910 – were actually voluntary departures and only 5,990 were “forced expulsions” according to Express.

This can be seen from the official statistics of the Federal Office for Immigration and Asylum. However, there was an increase of 1379 deportations compared to 2022; in the previous year, 3371 people were deported.

Banned in Schengen, after Austria gives a harsh verdict: Romanians, more dangerous than Afghans!

This figure is sobering given the record asylum applications of the past two years: 112,272 migrants applied for asylum in 2022, compared to 59,232 the previous year – the highest and third highest figure in the history of the the second Republic, after 1956, the year of the Hungarian uprising.

In other words: In the first two years since Karner became Home Secretary, an incredible 171,504 people applied for asylum – a solitary record

Read also: Head of the European Parliament: “The Schengen area will not be complete until it includes Romania”

Conversely, 4,750 expulsions does not seem like a very large number, but even this figure is too high, as can be seen if we look at the nationalities of the expelled migrants.

Almost 80% of the deportations targeted European citizens who had committed criminal offences. If we look at the top 20 countries of origin, 3209 were actually European citizens

80 percent of deportations concern European criminals

Therefore, a user X is right when he criticizes Karner: “They deported a lot of Slovak, Hungarian and Romanian beggars to be proud of these statistics.”

calso read: Nehammer does not give in, after the discussion with Iohannis, on Schengen. “Austria’s position remains unchanged”

By far the most deported migrants were Slovaks (1,380), followed by Hungarians (635), Romanians (531), Serbians (350), Poles (337), Czechs (165) and Bulgarians (161).

Those looking for Syrians in the top 20 will find a paltry 36 people, and those looking for Afghans will be disappointed. Five Afghans were deported in 2022.

Read also: Nehammer does not give in, after the discussion with Iohannis, on Schengen. “Austria’s position remains unchanged”

Therefore, deportations of Syrians and Afghans with a negative asylum decision are still long overdue, even though they are the two largest groups of asylum seekers. Applications for family reunification are also on the rise here.