Sweden brings in border checks to tackle refugees

Malm,Sweden: Sweden reinstated border controls on Thursday in a bid to gain control over the massive influx of migrants arriving in the country, without blocking the steady flow of asylum seekers. On Thursday, the police began carrying out identification checks on passengers travelling on trains crossing the bridge over the Oresund strait from Denmark, an AFP correspondent reported.

Police were also checking papers at terminals for ferries arriving in southern Sweden from Denmark and Germany.

Those are the routes most used by migrants. “This is not a fence. We need to make sure that we have control ... We have to make sure we know who is coming to Sweden,” Prime Minister Stefan Lofven insisted.

“Introducing border controls is not to prevent people from coming to Sweden to seek asylum,” the head of the Swedish Migration Agency, Anders Danielsson, meanwhile told Swedish news agency TT.

“On the contrary. They will have their case heard, but we need to (regain) control,” he added. Sweden, a country of 9.8 million people, has taken more refugees as a proportion of its population than any other country in Europe, as the continent struggles with its worst migration crisis.

The Scandinavian country expects to receive up to 1,90,000 asylum seekers this year — the equivalent of 1.5 million people arriving in a country the size of Germany, and more than double the 80,000 it took in last year.

The massive influx has strained Sweden’s capacity to take care of the new arrivals, with authorities recently warning they were no longer able to provide housing for them. “People are forced to sleep in tents, in offices and in evacuation centres” normally used for natural disasters, Mi-gration Agency spoke-sman Mikael Hvinlund said.