VIENNA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 17th November, 2022) Austria should enhance its border security, as the failure of the European Union's migration system has demonstrated deficiencies in security on the EU's external borders, Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer said on Wednesday.
"The European migration system has failed, Austria... received over 90,000 applications for asylum. It is too many and it shows that the protection of the EU's external borders is not functioning. It is also a security issue for the EU," Nehammer told journalists.
The Austrian government is preparing a number of measures aimed at strengthening security in Austria and the EU, Nehammer said.
Individual EU countries are forced to look for new partners to fight illegal immigration because Brussels' proposals on border protection are not enough, Nehammer added.
"Austria, Serbia and Hungary have created a partnership to fight illegal migration, human trafficking and organized crime. Why is this necessary? Because it is quite obvious that the EU migration system is not working. We have gotten to the point where individual EU states are forced to look for new forms of partnership and cooperation outside of what is possible within the EU," Nehammer said.
The Austrian chancellor also announced a Vienna partnership with Belgrade to extradite illegal immigrants.
"For the first time ever, we are organizing a project where we will already be extraditing illegal immigrants from Serbia, we have a lot of experience in that," Nehammer said.
In early September, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) reported that the number of illegal migrants arriving in the EU in the first eight months of the year was the highest ever recorded over the January-August period since 2016, when the EU saw massive flows of migrants coming from Syria.
