Minister says Austria will make itself ‘less attractive’ to migrants

According to media reports ministers have already agreed on a figure of no more than 120,000 over the next three or four years – equal to around 1.5 percent of Austria’s population of roughly 8.5 million people. Many also came from Iraq and Afghanistan.

However, a growing proportion of new arrivals is from countries where there is no war, such as Morocco, Algeria or even more-distant Pakistan. “Anyone who arrives at our border is now subject to control”, Chancellor Werner Faymann said this week.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants have entered Austria since it and Germany threw open their borders in early September.

Saying the EU had six to eight weeks to end division and inaction on managing immigration, Mark Rutte told reporters at the European Parliament in Strasbourg that if that failed “we have to think about a plan B”. The German president, the same day, said it may be “morally and politically” necessary to limit numbers.

Several countries, including Hungary and Poland, remain fervently opposed to such a quota system.

Breaking down the four-year ceiling, the statement said the number of asylum claims would be limited to 37,500 this year, falling annually to 25,000 in 2019.

Austria was initially a supporter of Mrs Merkel’s controverisal “open-door” policy, and has borne the brunt of the refugee crisis alongside Germany, taking in some 90,000 asylum-seekers a year ago.

“We can’t take in all asylum-seekers in Austria”, Chancellor Faymann said after a national asylum summit in Vienna. Merkel, who has attempted to rally Germans with the slogan “We can do it”, has pledged a “tangible reduction” in the number of asylum seekers arriving in Germany in the coming months.

Austria announced on Wednesday that it had made a decision to cut the number of refugees accepted into the country by half in 2016.

“It is hard to assume that we will be able to control by legal means the entry and exit from the country, especially without cooperating with Macedonia; that the signed readmission agreement will be respected, which has not been the case until now”, says Rados Djurovic.

A five-year-old girl and a woman died of cold on Wednesday as they tried to reach Greece by sea, as the flow of migrants heading for Europe resumed following a lull due to high winds.