EU dangles visa threat over countries refusing to take back migrants

STOCKHOLM: EU interior ministers reached “consensus” on Thursday to warn outside countries refusing to take back irregular migrants they risked tighter visa restrictions to Europe, Sweden´s migration minister said.

The ministers agreed that the tool, in place since 2020, “should be fully used” to boost the number of migrants whose asylum applications failed to return to their home countries, the minister, Maria Malmer Stenegard, told a news conference.

Sweden chaired the Stockholm meeting in its current role holding the EU presidency. “Should intensified political and diplomatic efforts not produce the desired results, member states call on the (European) Commission to come back to the (European) Council with proposals on visa restrictions,” Malmer Stenegard said.

EU home affairs commissioner Ylva Johansson stressed that many European Union countries were under “huge pressure”, receiving nearly one million asylum applications last year. The problem of capacity was aggravated by the fact that the EU was also hosting nearly four million Ukrainian refugees who had fled Russia´s war in their country, she said.

Johansson said it was “really important” to increase the number of returns of irregular migrants of nationalities less likely to succeed with asylum applications, citing “Moroccans, Egyptians, Tunisians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Turks. Cubans, Indians”.

Under international law, each asylum case needs to be weighed individually. But evidence of persecution was more likely to be provided from those fleeing wars, as in Syria, or repressive governments, as in Afghanistan and Iran. European Commission statistics show a low rate of effective returns.

In 2021, out of 340,500 orders for migrants to be returned to their countries of origin, only 21 percent were carried out. The EU funds various reintegration programmes in countries that readmit their citizens who have been denied asylum in Europe.