If you open the doors and offer them benefits, they will come:
More refugees have sought asylum in Sweden so far in 2015 than in any other year in the Nordic nation’s history, new figures released by the country’s Migration Agency have revealed. While earlier predictions suggested that 74,000 refugees would apply for migration in Sweden by December, Sweden’s Migration Agency (Migrationsverket) said over the weekend that 86,223 people had already launched their cases in 2015.
The figure surpasses a previous record set in 1992 when 84,016 people sought asylum in the Scandinavian country following fighting in the Balkans. Sweden’s Migration Agency announced on its website that it had run out of space in its emergency accommodation for new arrivals. The new figures emerged days after Sweden’s Prime Minister announced that tent camps would likely be needed in order to provide enough shelter to refugees. “Sweden is preparing for a crisis situation,” the Social Democrat leader told a press conference in Stockholm on Friday.
A crisis entirely of its own, deliberate, with-malice-aforethought making, one might observe. Meanwhile, NRO has a chilling piece explaining why most of the “migrants” are young, able-bodied men: they’re planning to bring their families over later.
Many of the men I interviewed traveling solo told me they had left their families behind and intended to reunite with them once they’d been accepted by a safe European country.
This helps to clarify why so many of Europe’s newcomers are young men. Of 102,753 registered arrivals through Italy and Greece, the International Organization of Migration found that 68,085 were men, with only 13,888 women and 20,780 children. At both the Hungary-Croatia border and the Serbia-Croatia border, I saw a noticeable majority of men, though it was nearly impossible to take a photograph without capturing at least one woman or child in the background.
“They tell us, ‘We do this dangerous trip on our own, we get asylum, and there is a law in the European Union that the family can come,’” says Christof Zellenberg, the chairman of the Europa Institute, who has been heavily involved in volunteer efforts in Vienna. You see few newcomers over 50, he adds, because “this is a grueling trip, and you need to be young and strong.”
Sclerotic welfare states, meet your new wards and, later, overlords.
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