Yesterday, Austria finally came to some agreement on having a limit (per year) to refugees being allowed to stay and get a visa there....37,500.
Why 37,500? This was not exactly laid out from the half-dozen news pieces that I read. Most 'scientists' like to use some statistical number, multiplied by another number, and then pumped through some Excel-spreadsheet....down through seven columns, and then you'd arrive at some number like 37,489. My hunch, the political guy standing there didn't want to talk about the dozen odd factors and multipliers.....so he rounded it up to 37,500 to be even and avoid discussion.
There are 8.47 million residents in Austria. There are roughly 810,000 foreigners (at least legally) who live there....coming close to ten-percent of the population. Of this group.....roughly 350,000 are Turkish.
What they said via interviews....was that the control and decision process would literally take 'minutes'.....not the six months that the BAMF in Germany now takes for paperwork and decision-making. If someone was found to have lied in the process? They get picked up later when the lie is discovered and taken to the airport....sent home....no second-chance to tell the truth.
How quick would the 37,500 number be reached? No one says much....but I'd take a guess that the quota would fill up in a matter of four to six weeks. What happens to the rest?
Well, that is the curious part of this quota system. No one....from Austria or Germany talks about the effect after you meet the ceiling.
I sat and pondered upon this. The truth is....people will still come through Greece and walk the 1,500-odd kilometers to reach either Austria or Germany. What happens after yearly quotas are met?
My humble guess is that they'd be pushed into a refugee camp and told to get a number, and when your number comes up.....you'd get a visa. If this took a year....two years.....three years....well, that'd be the method of controlling the flow. In some ways, the government would just grin at the citizens of the country and say they were obeying the populist theme of controlling refugees. At the same time.....the public would still be taxed enough to pay for refugee centers that would grow in size and scale.....with people sitting there for not just weeks or months.....but perhaps years.
Maybe I'm wrong about this.....but this gimmick to say you have a upper limit and only these visas will be given out this year.....has nothing to do with limiting the size of the refugee camps/centers.
Now, if I were some guy or gal from a war zone....I wouldn't care about this too much. I'd just want a real shelter, food, and the ability to feel safe. For a number of migrants or immigrants.....it's a different deal....they wanted a job, a car, and an opportunity. This group, in the literal sense, would be screwed with the ceiling cap limit. None of them would be agreeable to sitting for one, two or three years and waiting for some stupid visa to occur.
I'm not so much buying into the idea that ceiling caps will fix anything....it'll just change the game....making some people happy (the residents of the country), and some people very unhappy (the immigrants).
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