Austria on Thursday vetoed the accession of Romania and Bulgaria to the Schengen area, citing the problem of nearly 100,000 illegal migrants on its territory. The Austrian prime minister and interior minister claimed that these migrants had entered their country via the Balkan route, including Bulgaria and Romania. The government in Bucharest has tried to prove, using official data provided by European Union institutions, that the number of migrants from Romania is insignificant, less than 2%, and that migrants are a false argument, a lie, at least in the case of Romania.
An outright lie, a sinister exaggeration that they even come from Romania? Quite possibly. But the hundred thousand migrants from Austria is an indisputable truth. They are there, and they have somehow reached such large numbers in a small country like Austria that they have become a big political issue, especially in the run-up to elections. All the more reason for Vienna to urge Brussels to take a set of measures to reform the Schengen surveillance system and, above all, to distribute the migrants correctly to other member states.
The Austrian Prime Minister has been accused of cynically, unfairly, and unreasonably pursuing his own interests,
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