As Europe grapples with the wave of migrants, one country expects to expel up to 80,000 migrants whose asylum requests will likely be rejected.
Sweden said it expects to expel up to 80,000 migrants as another dozen people including children drowned off Greece in a desperate bid to reach Europe.
As the continent grapples with efforts to stem a record flow of migrants, Swedish Interior Minister Anders Ygeman said the mass expulsions of people who arrived in the Scandinavian country last year would require the use of specially chartered aircraft and be staggered over several years.
“We are talking about 60,000 people but the number could climb to 80,000,” he told Swedish media, adding that police and migration authorities had been tasked with organising the scheme.
Of the 58,800 asylum requests handled by Swedish migration authorities last year, 55 per cent were accepted. Many of those requests were however submitted in 2014, before the large migrant flow began.
Ygeman said he used the 55 per cent figure to estimate that around half of the 163,000 asylum requests received in 2015 would likely be rejected.
Sweden, a country of 9.8 million, is among the European Union states with the highest proportion of refugees per capita.
More than one million people travelled to Europe last year — the majority of them refugees fleeing conflict in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan — in the continent’s worst migration crisis since World War II.
