(JNi.media) Migrants who cross into Norway from Russia will be turned away without due process, Norwegian Minister of Justice and Public Security Anders Anundsen announced on Wednesday, emphasizing they will be immediately rejected, The Local reported.
“This is a group of asylum seekers that we do not consider to be at risk of persecution in Russia. Their decision to leave Russia for Norway is a misuse of the asylum system,” Anundsen said.
Following Sweden’s announcement that it can no longer handle its refugee situation and will implement stricter asylum rules, Norway said it would increase its own border controls beginning Thursday. All ferry arrivals from Sweden, Denmark and Germany will be subject to checks by Norwegian officials and popular land crossings will also see increased controls, PM Erna Solberg said. “We are implementing border controls at all ferry points. That means that people will have to document who they are when they come,” the PM told broadcaster NRK.
The Justice Ministry has told border officials to process the asylum applications “while the people concerned are still at the Storskog border crossing facilities.” Minister Anundsen said that Norway wants to immediately weed out those whose cases shouldn’t be considered and send them back to Russia as quickly as possible.
PM Solberg told NRK, “Now that Sweden has implemented border controls, it will help us. But it could also mean that more people will come to Norway via boat from Germany and Denmark.”
The Telegraph’s Fraser Nelson wrote recently that Sweden is on course to accepting 200,000 asylum seekers in 2015. Adjusted for population size, it would be tantamount to the UK taking a refugee city the size of Birmingham — 1.074 million out of an overall 64.1 million Brits.
According to the Norwegian Bureau of Statistics, despite similarities in the general immigration picture, there are major disparities among the Scandinavian countries in terms of immigrant numbers. Sweden currently has about three times as many immigrants as Norway and Denmark (1.43 versus 0.55 and 0.44 million). The figure for Sweden relates to foreign-born residents.
Sweden also has the highest percentage of foreign-born in Scandinavia, with 15% of the population at the start of 2012, compared with 10% on average for the EU; a figure provided by the European statistics agency Eurostat (2013). Sweden also has the highest share of descendants of immigrants, with 5%. Then follows Norway with 11% immigrants and 2% descendants of immigrants.
About half of all immigrants in Scandinavia are from countries in Asia, Africa or Latin America. Scandinavia now also has a high drop-out rate in upper secondary schools with a much higher percentage of boys than girls who do not complete upper secondary school within five years.
Finally, according to the Norwegian government’s report, Swedish authorities are reluctant to publish data on foreign-born persons’ participation in employment and education broken down by country of origin; the preferred method is to give figures by local region.