RefugeesAs refugee crisis grows, Sweden introduces border checks

Until earlier this week, Sweden had an open-border policy – literally. Refugees could take the train or board a ferry to Sweden and enter the country unobstructed.

Late last week, Sweden’s prime minister, Stefan Löfven, said this policy now poses a threat to national security.

The government on Tuesday, for the first time since the onset of the refugee crisis, ordered the introducing of border checks. The government’s decision went into effect after Löfven asked fellow European leaders, who met in Malta last week to discuss the refugee crisis, to help Sweden and Germany care for refugees.

The two countries have both accepted a large number of refugees.

The BBC reports that the Swedish government’s decision calls for the Swedish police to monitor those who arrive on trains and ferries from mainland Europe, and stop those without valid travel documents. Swedish officials stressed, though, that those seeking to apply for asylum in Sweden would not be turned back, and the purpose of the tighter monitoring of those arriving in Sweden is to deter those trying to cross Sweden in order to reach other Scandinavian countries.

“If they come to the border and request asylum, then we will process their request, but if they have no desire to stay, then that’s a question for the police,” a spokeswoman for Migrationsverket, Sweden’s migration agency, said.

In a Tuesday interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today program, Löfven said: “If you don’t have good control of who is coming here — what people are actually entering the county — that is a risk.”

Relative to the size of its population, Sweden has accepted more refugees than any other European country, with 10,000 asylum-seekers arriving every week. Sweden, with a population of ten million, expects to absorb at least 170,000 asylum seekers by the end of the year. Britain, with a population of more than sixty million, has committed to accept 4,000 Syrian refugees in the same period.

Löfven said that other EU countries cannot expect Sweden and Germany to bear the largest share of the refugee burden on their own. “I’ve been mentioning burden sharing for a long time,” Löfven told the BBC. “It is not sustainable that one country, or two countries, take the vast part of the responsibility. All European countries need to take responsibility. If the European Union can’t handle this situation, it’s serious.”

The BBC notes that most European countries have been slow to react to the crisis, leaving most of the burden to more willing countries like Sweden and Germany.

In Malta last Thursday, Gil Arias, the deputy head of the EU border agency Frontex, said EU countries had failed to provide the agency with the resources and personnel it required to deal with the record influx of migrants entering the EU.

“Up until now, member states have only committed 40 percent of the resources we asked for,” Arias told Spanish daily El Mundo.

Arias said the lack of resources has left Frontex in a difficult situation. “Often enormous expectations are generated over what the agency can do,” he said, noting that the agency had unofficially shifted its mandate in recent months from patrolling EU coastlines to carrying out daily rescues of migrants. “Frontex was not created to replace member states when it comes to rescue and border patrol, but rather to help them.”

In Sweden, the sheer number of arriving refugees has created a backlash. Politicians of the far-right Swedish Democrat party have called for an end to Swedish generosity, but the government says that Sweden has high moral standards to uphold, and that the growing domestic tensions over the country’s asylum policies are the result of negligence by other European countries.

“The big problem is in Europe,” Fredrik Bengtsson, spokesman for Migrationsverket, said. “There are so many different asylum systems. In Sweden we have one system, in Hungary they have another, so of course [refugees] are making the rational decision about where they want to go.

“The key for this question is not for Sweden to lower their standards, it’s for other people to raise theirs.”