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Sebastian Kurz is convinced that European migration policy has overcome many of the mistakes made in 2015. Austria will continue to struggle for generations with the challenges of integrating 120,000 asylum seekers.
Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, photographed on November 21, 2018 in Zurich.
Federal Chancellor, since 2015 almost 120,000 people have received asylum in Austria. Have these people made the country rich?
It is good that Austria is a country where there are many people with roots around the world who make a positive contribution. A certain internationality in research, science, culture and tourism can help the economy. But this should not be confused with the mass migration from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, of people who are often poorly trained or not at all trained, some not even literate. This is not in the economic benefit of the country.
How does Austria deal with this?
I was against the open border policy because I worked in the field of integration for years and I saw that the success of integration depends on the number of people to integrate. In 2015 he was dismissed as right-wing or right-wing extremist, but now, thank God, he has a majority among the heads of state and government of the European Union. In Austria, recent years have unleashed integration challenges that will occupy us for generations.
Can you name them specifically?
More than 100,000 people have received a positive asylum decision. That is an incredible number. It was possible to integrate 46 percent into the labor market, but many are still without work. More than half of Viennese schoolchildren have a mother tongue other than German. This poses significant challenges for the education system. These people come from parts of the world with different character and religious tradition. This also poses a challenge when it comes to transmitting values. One issue, for example, is imported anti-Semitism.
Almost half of the people entitled to asylum in 2015 have a job. Isn’t that an achievement?
If you see this in a positive light, then you have every right to do so. But put another way, there are tens of thousands of people who do not complete an apprenticeship or have a job: tens of thousands who have to be supported by the welfare state. We shouldn’t be satisfied with that, but I didn’t expect it otherwise. Taking countless people into account and then wondering why there are problems is naive.
Have your governments done enough for integration?
We have invested billions in integration, the labor market and education. The measures have even been expanded in recent years. But you cannot solve certain problems with money.
Austria has 8.9 million inhabitants. How responsive is the country?
By accepting 200,000 asylum seekers since 2015, we have already made a disproportionate contribution. It would be a mistake to keep putting pressure on our system. Together with Germany and Sweden, we are among the three countries that have hosted the most refugees per capita.
Do not the Mediterranean countries Italy and Greece bear a greater burden?
No, that’s wrong. If refugees only travel through one country, such as Italy, it is a moderate burden.
Since then, the number of refugees has dropped dramatically. In 2020, 6,500 people had applied for asylum here at the end of July.
Yes, but I caution against blocking what has happened in recent years. Of course, I am glad that the number of asylum applications has decreased significantly. We are on the right track.
Does the focus on those who came to the country since 2015 lead to the neglect of groups of foreigners who were already there? Recently, there were riots among young Turks in the Vienna district of Favoriten.
These incidents show that not many people have yet arrived in Austria. Furthermore, foreign conflicts are imported into our country. I condemn Turkish President Erdogan trying to instrumentalize Turks or migrants of Turkish origin living in Western Europe for his own purposes.
At the same time, the closure of the Balkan route coordinated by you would not have worked without the 2016 EU-Turkey Pact. Europe has become dependent on Erdogan.
It is extremely troublesome when Europe is blackmailed by Turkey. Earlier in the year, Erdogan used immigrants as weapons to pressure the EU. He urged the people to head to Greece and storm the border there. This is inhumane behavior. I would like a united European Union to take decisive action against it. I can’t understand why this doesn’t happen. We must show solidarity with Greece, which is at the forefront of defending Europe’s external border.
But can the EU have both: use Turkey as a holding basin for migrants and at the same time criticize them for using this role for their interests?
The EU is the strongest hinterland in the world and the largest donor of development cooperation. I think it is wrong for Europe to show weakness. The EU must support its partners, but must not allow Turkey to blackmail or threaten it.
How sustainable is a European migration policy that still depends on such partners five years after the 2015 crisis?
Europeans understand that accepting immigrants indefinitely is not the way to go. We are investing more to protect our external borders and we fight traffickers more actively. We have a Christian social responsibility. But if we want to fulfill it, we have to help on the spot.
Western countries have been doing this for decades. However, the pressure to migrate has increased.
It is a mistake to believe that this only diminishes with the help on the site. Therefore, the EU must even more actively support the positive dynamics on the African continent. Today more than a billion people live there; by the middle of the century there will be more than two billion. And most of the people fleeing internationally come from Africa.
People often flee years of conflict and violence. How can a country like Austria help locally?
Austria is helping with more than one billion euros, which are earmarked for development cooperation and humanitarian aid. That is a great contribution. Furthermore, a European commitment is needed in these countries to support the fight against corruption and thus sustainably improve people’s living conditions.
You say we have to support Greece. Unlike your coalition partner, the Greens, you reject the limited taking of underage refugees from Greek camps. Wouldn’t this be a requirement of solidarity?
No, because we would only admit the wrong system from 2015. If you bring people from the outer border of Europe to Central Europe, then more and more people go to Italy or Greece, the smugglers earn more and more money and more and more people they drown. My biggest criticism of what happened in 2015 is the fact that countless people have lost their lives.
The situation in Greece also shows that despite the lower numbers, the burden is still high in some areas. Shouldn’t there still be a distribution of refugees within the EU?
I don’t think it is realistic to force states to host refugees. I think that the distribution in Europe does not work because most of the EU states are skeptical or against it.
In an interview with NZZ in 2018, he mentioned resettlement programs as a way to selectively take in people and eliminate smugglers. Austria withdrew from this program in January. Are you going to reverse this decision?
No. We simply have too great challenges to integrate those who have come to us since 2015. But if other countries are willing to host people directly from affected areas, resettlement is the way to go.
Corona has publicly set aside the issue of migration. Is this even beneficial for the climate in your coalition with the much more liberal Greens?
We work very well together in the coalition and we combine the best of both worlds. I am very happy that together we have succeeded in helping Austria overcome the corona pandemic better than many other countries.
And how does the corona pandemic affect European migration policy?
Migration pressure will not decrease due to the economic crisis that triggered the pandemic. On the Mediterranean route we see many more Tunisians who want to go to Italy because tourism has collapsed. They are not war refugees, but economic migrants. If Europe allows Libyan smugglers to decide who comes to us, there will be more deaths in the Mediterranean.
The camps in Libya are anything but a decent place to stay.
It is true. But who runs these camps? The pull. And this is why we have to crush the smugglers’ business model to end such inhumane conditions.
At the same time, the Libyan coast guard receives support from EU countries, including Austria. A clear separation between the government, warlords, and smugglers is often impossible.
People from many African countries come to Libya because they believe they can cross into Europe from there. If we allow it, we are jointly responsible for the fact that people in these camps are beaten and, in some cases, also killed. As long as people are not detained, cared for and then transported home at the EU’s external border, human traffickers will offer their services. The EU must stop them.
Libya is a failed state. There will always be smugglers in those countries because it is a lucrative business.
This could be. But that shouldn’t stop the EU from fighting them.
EU Commission President von der Leyen has announced a migration pact for the fall, but he remains very vague. What are you waiting for?
Much has moved in the right direction since 2015. The open border policy no longer exists. I therefore assume that the President of the Commission will present a solution-oriented proposal that will be based on our concept of “flexible solidarity”: everyone should make a contribution where they can.
Where do you see the biggest conflicts within the EU? Has the division between East and West been overcome?
We need a Europe united in diversity and not divided in unity. We should allow different opinions, for example on the question of the admission of refugees. Of course, there should be no compromise on democracy, the rule of law and freedom of expression, but I would warn against a morally uplifted policy that gives other countries, for example in Eastern Europe, the feeling of being second-class members. .
A changing chancellor
mij. · Sebastian Kurz, 34, has been in charge of his second government since January. The main conservative politician in the Austrian People’s Party made headlines in 2017 when he incorporated the populist right-wing Freedom Party into a coalition with which he was primarily hardliner on foreign policy. The collapse of this government in the course of the Ibiza affair did not hurt Kurz: he came out stronger from the snap elections. He showed his political flexibility when he later associated with the clearly left-wing Greens.
