Tag Archives: Migrants

Austria takes another baby step towards tougher asylum rules

Migrants wait to cross the border from Slovenia into Spielfeld in Austria, F

VIENNA (Reuters) – Austria has taken its next step, albeit small, toward introducing tougher rules on immigration that will allow it to turn away asylum seekers at its borders within an hour and also to cap the number of asylum requests it accepts.

The government said on Tuesday it would start next week to collect expert opinions needed to pass an emergency decree necessary to trigger implementation of the new rules.

Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka wants the emergency decree to be introduced as soon as possible rather than when an agreed yearly cap of 37,500 is reached.

But Chancellory Minister Thomas Drozda said on Tuesday that debating the matter and procedural issues would take at least until late October.

He also said that turning away migrants at the border might be complicated by the fact Austria has not yet agreed on a deportation arrangement with its eastern neighbor Hungary and many other relevant countries.

“It’s a question of whether one wants to or should prepare now for a situation that will possibly occur in November or December,” Drozda told reporters.

Chancellor Christian Kern has not pushed for the implementation of the tougher rules on asylum claims yet and has said he saw little point in starting to do so if this year’s limit would only be reached around late November.

Austria has mostly served as a conduit into Germany for refugees and migrants from the Middle East, Afghanistan and Africa but the country of 8.5 million people has also taken in about 110,000 asylum seekers since last summer.

After initially welcoming refugees, the government decided to cap the number of asylum claims it would accept this year and has made family reunification harder for migrants, steps widely criticized by EU states and human rights groups.

Drozda said the number of asylum requests had reached 24,260 at the end of July with requests coming in at a much slower pace than last year.

Austria led efforts that resulted in the closing of the so-called Balkan route from Turkey to northern Europe and is turning away an increasing number of migrants at its southern border with Italy.

Also on Tuesday, the Danish government proposed the adoption of a law that would enable police to reject asylum seekers at the borders in times of crisis such as that in 2015 when thousands of migrants sought to enter the country.

(Reporting by Shadia Nasralla; Editing by Louise Ireland)

Migrant arrivals to Greek islands jump to highest in weeks

A rescue boat of the Spanish NGO Proactiva approaches an overcrowded wooden vessel with migrants from Eritrea, off the Libyan coast in Mediterranean Sea

ATHENS (Reuters) – More than 460 migrants and refugees arrived on Greek islands from Turkey on Tuesday, the highest in several weeks, despite a European Union deal with Ankara agreed in March to close off that route.

Greek authorities recorded 462 new arrivals between Monday and Tuesday morning, up from 149 the previous day. Most entered through the Aegean islands of Lesbos and Kos.

The numbers are small compared to the number of those trying to reach Italy from Africa — some 6,500 migrants were saved off the Libyan coast on Monday, the Italian coast guard said — and far fewer than the thousands a day arriving in Greece last summer.

Daily arrivals fluctuate, ranging from a couple of hundred migrants and refugees a day to just tens, but indicate a steady inflow five months after the deal with Turkey was agreed. Under the accord, those who cross to Greece without documents from March 20 will be sent back to Turkey unless they apply for asylum and their claim is accepted.

The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) said it recorded a rise in arrivals toward the end of August but it was too early to say if there had been a change in trends.

“So far it doesn’t look like that but we are following the situation very closely,” UNHCR spokesman William Spindler told a U.N. briefing in Geneva.

According to UNHCR, an average 100 people a day arrived on Greek islands from Turkey in August, up from 60 in July. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) said 2,808 people arrived in Greece through August 28, the largest monthly number since April.

IOM spokesman Joel Millman said the number of arrivals had been climbing in recent weeks and there were also signs of more migrants and refugees leaving Turkey for Bulgaria.

So far under the deal, just 482 people have been deported to Turkey but none had applied for asylum, Greece says. No rejected asylum seekers have been sent back.

That has pushed the number of migrants and refugees on Greece’s islands to 12,120 from 5,538 in March. Most are Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis, living in overcrowded camps.

More than 163,000 migrants and refugees have arrived in Greece by sea this year, UNHCR says. In 2015, it was the main gateway into Europe for over 1 million people fleeing war and conflict in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

This summer has seen a sharp rise in mostly African migrants and refugees trying to reach Italy from the north African coast.

(Reporting by Karolina Tagaris in Athens and Tom Miles in Geneva; Editing by Alexandra Hudson)

Migrant influx pushes German population growth to highest since 1992

A woman wears an Islamic headdress while visiting Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germ

BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany’s population registered its biggest increase in more than 20 years in 2015, data showed on Friday, as record numbers of migrants entered the country.

More than a million people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and beyond flocked to Europe’s most populous nation last year, drawn by Germany’s strong economy, relatively liberal asylum laws and generous system of benefits.

Net migration reached a record high of 1,139,000, more than doubling from 2014, the Federal Statistics Office said.

A domestic debate about the benefits and drawbacks of migration has been raised a notch by a recent spate of violent attacks on civilians, some of which were claimed by Islamist militants.

Federal elections are due next year and some German politicians have argued the influx will help ease a shortage of skilled labour as the population ages and birth rates fall.

Others are worried such a large number of migrants, many of whom lack the language skills and training Germany needs, is placing a heavy burden on the social safety net.

With 188,000 more people having died in Germany in 2015 than were born, overall the population rose by 978,000 to 82.2 million, its strongest rise since 1992.

The Interior Ministry has said 1.1 million migrants arrived in Germany last year with the aim of seeking asylum, with just under 480,000 applying. Asylum seekers have faced delays in making their applications.

The statistics office said the figures it used to calculate net migration were based on numbers registering at registration offices. Asylum seekers are initially housed in reception centres and generally only register later.

All of Germany’s 16 regions saw their populations increase. Asylum seekers are spread around the country based on each state’s population and tax revenues.

At the end of 2015 there were 8.7 million foreign nationals living in Germany, an increase of 14.7 percent compared with the previous year, with foreigners making up 10.5 percent of the population.

The IAB German labour office research institute estimated on Friday that the number of people who come to Germany in search of protection would fall to around 300,000 to 400,000 this year.

It said that estimate was dependent on the continued existence of the European Union’s migrant deal with Turkey, which aims to stem the flow of illegal migrants to Europe, and the Balkan route remaining closed.

The IAB said the number of new arrivals had stabilised at about 16,000 refugees per month since April. That compares with more than 200,000 in November.

(Reporting by Michelle Martin; additional reporting by Holger Hansen; editing by John Stonestreet and Dominic Evans)

Migrant relocation plan must be bigger and move faster according to U.N.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi meets with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras at the Maximos Mansion in Athens

By Karolina Tagaris

ATHENS (Reuters) – A European Union scheme to relocate migrants and refugees from frontline countries Greece and Italy to other member states must be bigger and move faster, the U.N. refugee chief said in Athens on Wednesday.

The program, devised last year, was intended to relocate 160,000 from Greece and Italy to other European countries over two years but fewer than 4,000 people have moved so far.

Some central European member had fought the scheme, with Hungary and Slovakia challenging the decision in EU courts.

“I will certainly continue to advocate on behalf of the refugees, on behalf of the states hosting them – Italy and Greece principally – for this program to be bigger and to be accelerated,” U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi told reporters.

“It is one example of European solidarity and cooperation that can and must work so we need to put all our energy in trying to make it work.”

Italy’s interior minister said on Tuesday that Germany had agreed to take in hundreds of migrants who are blocked in Italy.

Asked if the program could still work, Grandi said: “I hope that it will. Because in fact it must work.”

Grandi was speaking after a visit to a Syrian family from Aleppo, living in an Athens apartment under a scheme launched by the UNHCR and EU Commission.

The family of seven – a mother, two grandparents and four children – were displaced for years inside Syria before fleeing to Europe this summer. They are all relocation candidates.

“They left behind a good life to come here and to escape from the war,” said Sofia, whose family owns the apartment and who lives with her own family in the flat above, urging other Greeks to open their homes to refugees and migrants.

“We could have be in their shoes,” she said. She declined to give her family name.

The family are among more than 58,000 refugees and migrants, mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, who have arrived in Greece since March hoping to move further north through Europe but who ended up stranded by border closures in the Balkans.

Most live in difficult, unsanitary camps across the country. Greece is also seeking new facilities to alleviate overcrowding at centres on five islands.

During his three-day visit to Athens, the second this year, Grandi said the UNHCR would keep pushing the EU for more support.

But he also underlined that efforts to end the conflict in Syria and other war-torn countries should be stepped up.

“Refugees are mostly the result of unresolved conflict and until and unless we solve those conflicts the risk of new influxes and new emergencies cannot be excluded,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Gina Kalovyrna; Editing by Alison Williams)

To deter refugees, Norway readies fence on ex cold war border

Two migrants on bicycles cross the border between Norway and Russia in Storskog near Kirkenes in Northern Norway

By Alister Doyle

OSLO (Reuters) – Norway is putting up a steel fence at a remote Arctic border post with Russia after an influx of migrants last year, sparking an outcry from refugees’ rights groups and fears that cross- border ties with the former Cold War adversary will be harmed.

The government says a new gate and a fence, about 200 meters (660 feet) long and 3.5 meters high stretching from the Storskog border point, is needed to tighten security at a northern outpost of Europe’s passport-free Schengen zone.

For decades, the Nordics have enjoyed the image of being a reliable haven for asylum seekers.

But the erection of the fence, at a spot where 5,500 migrants mainly from Syria crossed into Norway last year, reflects a wider shift in public attitudes against refugees.

This is seen too in Sweden, Norway’s neighbor, which was once touted as a “humanitarian superpower”, but is setting up border controls this year and has toughened asylum rules.

Refugee groups and some opposition politicians say Norway’s fence will deter people fleeing persecution and is an unwelcome echo of the Cold War in a region where relations have generally flourished since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

The fence will be erected in the coming weeks, before winter frosts set in, to make it harder to slip into Norway via a forest. Workers have so far done some preparatory work, clearing away old wooden barriers put up to control reindeer herds.

“The gate and the fence are responsible measures,” Deputy Justice Minister Ove Vanebo told Reuters, defending the move.

Both Moscow and Oslo have cracked down on the Arctic route, one that a few refugees found less risky than crossing the Mediterranean by boat, since last year’s inflow of migrants.

So far this year, no one has sought asylum via the northern frontier, according to the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration.

“I can’t see a need for a fence. There are too many fences going up in Europe today,” said Rune Rafaelsen, the mayor of the Soer-Varanger region which includes the border, told Reuters, pointing to barbed wire in nations such as Hungary.

Russia still maintains a fence the length of the 196 km frontier with NATO member Norway, sometimes several kilometers back from the dividing line. It has not complained about the Norwegian plans to build a fence.

But Rafaelsen, of the opposition Labour Party, said the region had made great progress in improving civilian ties since an Iron Curtain divided Norway from the Soviet Union and he, and others, saw the plans for a fence as a backward step.

“We’ve an obligation to be a country people can flee to,” said Linn Landro, of the Refugees Welcome group in Norway. “The fence sends a very negative signal, including to Russia because it says that ‘we don’t trust you’.”

Norwegians and Russians in the region can visit visa-free for short trips. About 250,000 people crossed the border last year, a decline from recent years but to be compared with just 5,000 a year in the Cold War.

Norway’s border Commissioner Roger Jakobsen said a weak rouble has made Norway more costly for Russians, road repairs have made crossings harder and ties have cooled after Norway and other Western nations imposed sanctions after Moscow annexed Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014.

He doubted the fence would be a new deterrent and said there had been no complaints from Russia. “We shouldn’t make a storm in a teacup out of it,” he said.

(Reporting By Alister Doyle; Editing by Alistair Scrutton and Richard Balmforth)

Hungarian MEP: Pigs’ heads would deter migrants from border fence

The border crossing between Austria and Hungary near Rattersdorf, Austria,

BUDAPEST (Reuters) – A Hungarian member of the European Parliament has sparred with a human rights campaigner and caused an outcry on Twitter after writing that pigs’ heads along the border fence erected by Hungary to keep out migrants would make an effective deterrent.

Under conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Hungary has taken one of the toughest stances among fellow European Union members against the recent mass influx of migrants and refugees to the bloc, a crisis that has divided the EU.

Last year Hungary erected a razor wire topped fence along its southern border to stop migrants, patrolled by thousands of extra troops. On Oct. 2, the country will hold a referendum on whether they agree with the EU’s policy of mandatory settlement of migrants without consent of parliament.

The MEP behind the comments was Gyorgy Schopflin, a former BBC employee and London-based professor, who has been an MEP for Orban’s conservative Fidesz party since 2004.

On Aug. 19, Andrew Stroehlein, Human Rights Watch’s Brussels-based European media director, re-posted on Twitter a Washington Post article and photos showing root vegetables carved into shapes of human faces and put up along Hungary’s southern fence.

These images had earlier appeared on a Facebook page that supports Hungary’s border troops, with the caption: “Instead of scarecrows, these are ‘scarepeople’ made from sugar beet. Seems to work, nobody cut through the fence here in four weeks.”

Stroehlein objected to the images, writing: “Refugees are fleeing war and torture, Hungary. Your root vegetable heads will not deter them.”

On Saturday, Schopflin replied to Stroehlein.

“Might do so. Human images are haram,” he said, referring to forbidden acts under Islam. “But agree, pig’s head would deter more effectively.”

Stroehlein shot back.

“An MEP spouting such xenophobic filth… You are an embarrassment to Hungary, to Europe and to humanity,” he said.

In a subsequent torrent of comments from followers of either men, Schopflin was mostly derided for his remark. He occasionally defended by people who opposed immigration but said he never made any proposal to put up pigs’ heads, telling Reuters his comment had been “a thought experiment.”

He said he planned no apology. “It’s anthropologically intriguing how sensitive the topos is.”

(Reporting by Marton Dunai; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)

Naming the nameless: experts struggle to identify drowned migrants

Wooden crosses for an unmarked refugee grave

By Isla Binnie and Michele Kambas

ROME/ATHENS (Reuters) – Mose tapped the screen of his mobile phone to zoom in on a photograph of his wife, Yordanos, pointing to a mole under her eyebrow.

“She has a recognizable mark here,” the 26-year-old Eritrean said in a park in Rome; after fleeing compulsory military service back home, Mose now lives in an Italian reception center for migrants.

He has not seen Yordanos since May 26 when they left Libya, packed by people smugglers on to two separate boats bound for Italy. He was rescued, but her boat sank in the Mediterranean.

Helping people like Mose find out their loved ones’ fate is becoming ever more pressing as Europe’s migrant crisis drags on in its third year and the death toll rises.

Teams of forensic scientists in Italy and Greece are painstakingly trying to identify the victims of drowning found at sea, washed up on shores or recovered from wrecks.

However, there is no common practice to collect information about these deaths between states or even sometimes within the same country, and a plan by the Dutch-based International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) to start tracing lost migrants is still awaiting funding.

Kathryne Bomberger, director general of the ICMP, said the problem was too big to be left solely to front-line countries such as Italy and Greece.

“This is a complex, international problem,” she said, as the task of identification and notification involves tracking down relatives who may be in their home countries, in refugee camps, or building new lives in the likes of Germany or Sweden.

“We are ready to go, we have the necessary database systems, we have an agreement with Italy, we have done our homework. We just need the financial support.”

The ICMP and International Organization for Migration (IOM) are calling for a strategy to process the data, and a system for repatriating migrants’ remains.

REPLACING NUMBERS WITH NAMES

Mose, who withheld his surname for fear of reprisals from Eritrean authorities, clings to the hope that Yordanos was rescued and that she could be recognised from the photograph.

If she did not survive, and her body was recovered, her remains are likely to have been buried in one of hundreds of numbered graves in Sicily or the southwestern Calabria region for migrants who have drowned.

Both in Italy and Greece, which migrants have also tried to reach on a shorter but still dangerous sea crossing from Turkey, the forensic experts are trying to replace the numbers with names.

Sometimes they succeed, despite the practical and financial problems, as in the case of a baby boy found floating near the Greek island of Samos in January.

The child, no more than six months old, had been lost in a shipwreck on Oct. 29, 2015 when 19 migrants drowned. For over two months, his body drifted more than 150 km (95 miles) north until it was recovered from the water.

In the end, police identified the little boy from a DNA sample given by his Syrian father, who was among 139 people rescued when the boat sank in the Aegean off the island of Kalymnos.

“It is the least we can do for these people, under very difficult circumstances,” said Penelope Miniati, director of the Greek police’s Forensic Sciences Division.

For some, the tragedies recall Greece’s own history of migration, including in the 1950s and ’60s when many escaped poverty for a new life in countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia, breaking up families who sometimes lost contact with each other.

“We are Greeks, we also migrated and some people were lost in the journey … and each time people wondered what had happened to them,” said Miniati.

“IMPROVISATION”

More than three quarters of the 4,027 migrant and refugee deaths worldwide in 2016 so far happened in the Mediterranean, according to the IOM.

Most died between Libya and Italy. Hundreds also drowned on the Turkey-Greece route, although arrivals have fallen sharply since a deal between the European Union and Ankara on curbing the flow in March.

Many shipwreck victims are never recovered, but about 1,500 have been brought to Italy since 2013. So far, just over 200 have been identified.

In a “policy vacuum” the action in Italy and Greece has been driven by “improvisation”, the IOM said in June in a joint report with City University London and the University of York.

The report praised a deal that Italy’s special commissioner for missing persons struck with a university laboratory, which provides free forensic work, and the interior ministry, to adopt a protocol to identify victims and inform relatives.

The commissioner records details of corpses and sends notices through embassies and humanitarian organizations asking survivors for photographs of the missing, and personal effects such as toothbrushes that could harbor DNA.

In Athens, Miniati’s division has a database with information on 647 people who need identifying, about 80 percent of them the nameless dead of the migrant crisis.

People who drown and stay trapped underwater for months are often unrecognizable, so accounts of scars, tattoos and dental cavities help. Some people come to Italy to look for missing relatives in the commissioner’s files and some take DNA tests.

VALUES THAT COUNT

Deputy Italian Commissioner Agata Iadicicco said a shared international database would make it easier to reach migrants’ home countries and diasporas across Europe. “We need money to standardize this model and to involve all the migrant communities that mainly live in northern Europe,” she said.

With no sign of a let-up in the perilous voyages from North Africa, Italy feels that fellow EU countries should pull their weight more in handling the crisis.

The issue of graves for the victims has become caught up in the ill-feeling. Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said he sent the navy to raise a ship that sank last year and bury the more than 450 people found in the wreck to “tell Europe which values really count”.

For Mose, whose young son is still in Eritrea, even being sure Yordanos had died would be some comfort. “If I find her body, I can find some serenity,” he said. “If my son asks whether his mother is, at least I can say where she is buried.”

(editing by David Stamp)

U.S. seeks Latin American help amid rise in Asian, African migrants

Detainees sleep and watch television in a holding cell where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed and held at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection

By Julia Edwards

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Washington is seeking closer coordination with several Latin American countries to tackle a jump in migrants from Asia, Africa and the Middle East who it believes are trying to reach the United States from the south on an arduous route by plane, boat and through jungle on foot.

U.S. agents deployed to an immigration facility on Mexico’s southern border have vetted the more than 640 migrants from countries outside the Americas who have been detained at the center since October 2015, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) documents reviewed by Reuters.

The migrants often fly to Brazil, obtain fake passports there, and are smuggled to Panama before heading through Central America to Mexico’s porous southern border, according to transcripts of 14 interviews conducted at the center and other internal briefing documents seen by Reuters.

The U.S. agents’ findings come as Mexican immigration data show 6,342 Asian, African and Middle Eastern migrants were apprehended trying to enter Mexico in the first six months of this year. That was up from 4,261 in all of 2015, and 1,831 in 2014.

U.S. border apprehensions point to the same trend. Between October 2015 and May 2016, U.S. agents apprehended 5,350 African and Asian migrants at the U.S. Southwest border. That’s up from 6,126 in all of fiscal year 2015 and 4,172 in all of fiscal year 2014.

U.S. concerns about potential security risks from migrants using the unusual and circuitous southern route have been growing in recent years, following a string of Islamic State-inspired attacks in the West and the surge in Syrian refugees fleeing that country’s civil war.

Five Syrian nationals detained in Honduras last November were part of a wider group of seven Syrians who acquired forged passports in Brazil and then went by land to Argentina on their way north, a U.S. government source familiar with that case said. There was no evidence to suggest the men were militants.

“The reality is that the vast majority of the people that Mexico encounters that are extra-continental will eventually end up on our border,” a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official said.

At the detention camp in Tapachula, near Mexico’s border with Guatemala, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents have been training their Mexican counterparts on interview techniques, and using U.S. criminal databases to investigate detainees, according to internal documents seen by Reuters.

Two to three U.S. agents have been stationed there since at least October, according to the documents and U.S. officials. Mexican officials have previously acknowledged the presence of U.S. agents at Mexico’s southern border, but few details of the cooperation have been reported.

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol began a pilot program for a similar operation in Panama earlier this fiscal year, according to an internal memo sent in May that has not previously been reported. Homeland Security officials told Reuters that Panama requested U.S. training. A spokesman for Panama’s National Migration Service said Panama accepted an offer from the U.S. embassy for training on subjects like “defense techniques” and “management of persons.”

U.S. proponents of the program have pushed for a greater U.S. footprint to build a “comprehensive intelligence picture” of migration patterns across the Colombia-Panama border, according to the memo sent in May.

Panama is leading the effort in Central America to detain illegal migrants, DHS assistant secretary for international affairs Alan Bersin told a House committee in March, but it stymied by lack of detention space and the difficulty of deporting migrants to countries with whom they have no diplomatic ties. As a result, most are released after 30 days.

Bersin acknowledged the rise in migrants from outside the Americas and the potential security threat they pose.

“While many citizens of these countries migrate for economic reasons or because they are fleeing persecution in their home countries, this group may include migrants who are affiliated with foreign terrorist organizations, intelligence agencies, and organized criminal syndicates,” Bersin told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

DHS has deployed additional “mentor” teams throughout South and Central America to professionalize immigration authorities and gain intelligence about potentially threatening migrants, said DHS officials, who declined to specify which countries host U.S. agents.

Another DHS official said the agency is asking Brazil through diplomatic channels to put a stop to fake passport manufacturing. Brazilian officials did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, a unit of DHS, is “actively working to enhance regional collaboration with border and customs authorities from Mexico all the way down to Argentina,” a DHS official said.

ON FOOT IN THE JUNGLE

The apprehension documents from the Tapachula center show how migrants are willing and able to pay thousands of dollars to obtain flights and fake passports and then make grueling journeys on buses, boats and on foot.

It was not clear how many of those apprehended at the center were deported, claimed asylum or simply released.

Several of the 14 migrants — in testimony given from May 18-23 this year — said they paid more than $10,000 to smugglers, walked for days through jungles, and were temporarily detained by various countries before being stopped in Tapachula.

Six of the men — who included Pakistanis, Syrians and Afghans– had obtained fake passports, claiming to be from Israel, Morocco, Belgium or Britain.

In Panama, several of the men said they were kept in a migration detention camp for about a month. From Panama, the migrants described traveling in larger groups, sometimes as many as 50 men.

One Pakistani national — whose identity U.S. officials asked not to be revealed because he is still under investigation — told U.S. and Mexican officials that he paid a smuggler in Pakistan $9,000 to be smuggled to Brazil where he received a fake Belgian passport.

In Brazil, he paid $4,000 to a woman to be taken on bus, boat and on foot through across Colombia and into Panama.

He said he was detained in Panama but then released. From there, a smuggler from Lebanon took the man and 35 other migrants of different nationalities to Honduras, where he said he was robbed of all of his belongings.

His family wired him more money from Pakistan and the man was able to pay $40 to be smuggled into Guatemala. He paid $5 to be taken by raft into Mexico. There he got a taxi, which was halted by authorities who took him to the Tapachula center.

SENSITIVE TOPIC FOR MEXICO

Accepting U.S. help on immigration issues is politically sensitive for Mexico, said Adam Isacson, a security and border policy analyst at The Washington Office on Latin America, a non-profit human rights advocacy group.

“But the Mexicans have quietly been open to the equipment and training they have received,” he said.

A CBP spokesman said the agency deployed to Tapachula at the Mexican government’s request. Mexico’s immigration agency is the Instituto Nacional de Migracion (INM).

“CBP personnel train INM officers in the collection of biometric information, and review and share biometric information on people of interest,” the spokesman said.

INM declined Reuters’ request for comment and access to the Tapachula facility.

In testimony before the Mexican Senate on Aug. 3, Mexico’s chief immigration officer Ardelio Vargas Fosado said his agency was aware of the influx of migrants from outside the Americas. But the lack of diplomatic relationships between Mexico and many African countries has made it difficult to deport those apprehended, he said.

Under law, U.S. agents cannot arrest or deport migrants from other countries, but as foreign-based trainers, they can gather intelligence on who may be headed for the U.S. border.

Isacson said most of the migrants taking the Latin American path northward are seeking economic opportunity in the United States. But DHS is focused on security risks.

“The Tapachula area is along a permeable border. DHS views it as one of the areas where a terrorist group that wants to do harm on U.S. soil would be most likely to come in,” he said.

(Reporting by Julia Edwards, Additional reporting by Richard Cowan in Washington, Frank Jack Daniel, Enrique Andres Pretel and Joanna Bernstein in Mexico; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Stuart Grudgings)

Give us EU visa freedom in October or abandon migrant deal, Turkey says

urkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu speaks during a news conference with the Adviser to Pakistan's Prime Minister on National Security and Foreign Affairs,

By Michelle Martin and Humeyra Pamuk

BERLIN/ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkey could walk away from its promise to stem the flow of illegal migrants to Europe if the European Union fails to grant Turks visa-free travel to the bloc in October, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told a German newspaper.

His comments in Bild’s Monday edition coincide with rising tension between Ankara and the West following the July 15 failed coup attempt. Turkey is incensed by what it sees as an insensitive response from Western allies to the failed putsch in which 240 people, many of them civilians, were killed.

Europe and the United States have been worried by the crackdown following the coup. Some Western governments are concerned this could affect stability in the NATO member and suspect that President Tayyip Erdogan is using the purges as an excuse to quash dissent.

Asked whether hundreds of thousands of refugees in Turkey would head to Europe if the EU did not grant Turks visa freedom from October, Cavusoglu told Bild: “I don’t want to talk about the worst case scenario – talks with the EU are continuing but it’s clear that we either apply all treaties at the same time or we put them all aside.”

Visa-free access to the EU – the main reward for Ankara’s collaboration in choking off an influx of migrants into Europe – has been subject to delays due to a dispute over Turkish anti-terrorism legislation, as well as Ankara’s crackdown.

Brussels wants Turkey to soften the anti-terrorism law, which Ankara says it cannot change, given multiple security threats which include Islamic State militants in neighboring Syria and Kurdish militants in its mainly Kurdish southeast.

European Commissioner Guenther Oettinger has said he does not see the EU granting Turks visa-free travel this year due to Ankara’s crackdown after the failed military coup.

Cavusoglu said treaties laid out that all Turks would get visa freedom in October, adding: “It can’t be that we implement everything that is good for the EU but that Turkey gets nothing in return.”

A spokesman for the European Commission declined to comment on the interview directly but said the EU continued to work together with Turkey in all areas of cooperation.

THOUSANDS DETAINED

Selim Yenel, Turkey’s ambassador to the EU, said last week that efforts were continuing to find a compromise with the EU on visa liberalization and he thought it would be possible to handle this in 2016.

Since the coup, more than 35,000 people have been detained, of whom 17,000 have been placed under formal arrest, and tens of thousands more suspended. Turkish authorities blame the failed putsch on U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen and his followers.

Amid rising tension with the West, Turkey has sought to normalize relations with Russia, sparking fears in the West that Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin might use a rapprochement to exert pressure on Washington and the EU and stir tensions within NATO.

Asked if Turkey would leave NATO, Cavusoglu told Bild that while Turkey remained one of the biggest supporters of the 28-nation Western alliance, it was also looking at other options.

“But it’s clear that we also need to cooperate with other partners on buying and selling weapon systems because some NATO partners refuse to allow us to sell air defense systems for example or to exchange information,” he said.

Over the weekend, Turkey summoned Austria’s charge d’affaires in Ankara over what it said it was an “indecent report” about Turkey on a news ticker at Vienna airport.

“Turkey allows sex with children under the age of 15,” read a headline on an electronic news ticker at the airport, images circulated on social media showed.

In a statement, Turkey’s foreign ministry said it was “regrettable” that an international airport at the heart of Europe was used as “a tool … in spreading such irresponsible, twisted and inaccurate messages”.

It said the publication of such “slandering” news reports were encouraged by recent comments from Austrian politicians.

Cavusoglu this month referred to Austria as the “capital of radical racism” after Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern suggested ending EU accession talks with Turkey.

(Additional reporting by Julia Fioretti in Brussels; writing by David Dolan; Editing by Paul Carrel and Richard Balmforth)

Out of sight, out of mind? Europe’s migrant crisis still simmers

A woman sits and looks on outside a building covered up with sheets to protect the dwellers from the strong summer sun outside of the disused Hellenikon airport, where stranded refugees and migrants are temporarily accommodated in Athens, Greece,

By Michele Kambas and Antonio Bronic

ATHENS/ZAGREB (Reuters) – A year after hundreds of thousands of refugees snaked their way across southeastern Europe and onto global television screens, the roads through the Balkans are now clear, depriving an arguably worsening tragedy of poignant visibility.

Europe’s migrant crisis is at the very least numerically worse than it was last year. More people are arriving and more are dying. But the twist is that, compared with last year, a lot of it is out of sight.

Take the border between Greece and Macedonia. Summer crops have replaced the city of tents at the border outpost of Idomeni, even if some locals are convinced there is an unseen population hiding in the surrounding forests, waiting for smugglers to assist them on their onward journey.

The tiny Greek village was a focal point of the migrant flow north toward Germany and other wealthy countries, with thousands of refugees squatting for months waiting for sealed borders with Macedonia to open

Elsewhere in the Balkans, a Reuters photographer, revisiting the people-packed locations where he and his colleagues captured last year’s diaspora, found empty roads, unencumbered railway tracks and bucolic countryside.

The comparison is stark.

More than one million people fleeing conflict in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan made their way to Europe last year, with the majority of them crossing the precarious sea corridor separating Greece and Turkey, the temporary home for more than 2 million refugees displaced from Syria.

They came carrying their worldly belongings in plastic bags and hauling babies on weary shoulders, a visual exodus of the kind not seen in Europe since the end of World War Two.

Many have since reached their destination in northern Europe, but with the borders closed and the European Union now attempting to contain the numbers, thousands are stuck at holding centers in Greece and Italy.

They are not so nearly visible there – nor are the ones still coming.

VISIBILITY DOWN, ARRIVALS UP

According to data from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), arrivals are up 17 percent on last year, stoked mainly by a spike at the start of the year through Greece.

Deaths among those trying to get to Europe, mainly due to drowning, are up more than 15 percent.

“This is not a blip,” said David Miliband, a former British foreign minister who now heads the International Rescue Committee, an aid group set up by Albert Einstein – himself a refugee – to rescue Europeans before the outbreak of World War Two.

“The forces that are driving more and more people from their homes – weak states, big tumults within the Islamic world, a divided international system .. None of these things are likely to abate soon.”

Some of the mantle of accepting huge migrant flows that was carried by Greece last year and the beginning of this one has been taken up by Italy.

This follows a resurgence of migrant flows from northern Africa. More than 140,000 asylum seekers are now housed in Italian shelters, a seven-fold increase on 2013, with the migrant crisis in its third year.

In Greece, where arrivals plunged in the wake of an accord between Turkey and the EU to stem the flow in March, an estimated 57,000 migrants were still stuck in the country by Aug.8.

Campaigners say the accord has lulled policymakers into a false sense of accomplishment by allowing them to believe that Europe’s migration problem has been solved.

“By outsourcing the responsibility to Turkey and to Greece, European governments are basically saying ‘we have solved the crisis because we don’t see it, and we can’t smell it and we can’t hear it,” said Gauri van Gulik, deputy Europe director at Amnesty International.

“The crisis is as big as ever, and as yet unsolved by governments,” she told Reuters.

IOM data says that 258,186 people arrived in Europe by the end of July, compared with 219,854 over the same period in 2015. There were 3,176 fatalities by Aug. 7, outpacing the 2,754 who died in the first eight months of last year, a slightly longer period.

“Its absolutely incredible because if you think about the panic this caused last year and the incentive there was to really get some policy changes in place, nothing has happened,” Van Gulik said.

(Additional reporting by Steve Scherer in Rome, Lefteris Papadimas in Athens Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)