The Austrian cabinet approved new measures on Wednesday requiring asylum seekers to hand over their mobile phones and up to 840 euros ($1,040) in cash to the authorities.
The money will be put towards the costs of their applications, while authorities will examine whether geo-location data from refugees’ phones match their accounts of how they arrived in the country. If the applicant is found to have previously entered another European country where the so-called “Dublin regulation” is in force, they could be sent back there.
Interior Minister Herbert Kickl, from the far-right Freedom Party
(FPOe) said his aim was a “restrictive and enforceable law regarding the rights of foreigners” in order to end “abuse” of the asylum system. The measures are due to be voted through by parliament in the next few weeks.
In last year’s parliamentary election, a crackdown on immigration was one of the FPOe’s key themes and was also adopted by Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and his centre-right Austrian People’s Party (OeVP).
Austria received more than 150,000 asylum applications — almost 2 percent of its total population of 8.7 million — following the migration crisis of 2015.
‘Intrusion Into Privacy’
The measures announced on Wednesday also mean that refugees will only be able to apply for Austrian citizenship after ten years, as opposed to six previously. Deportations of asylum applicants convicted of crimes will also be speeded up.
Human rights pressure group SOS Mitmensch denounced the measures.
“When the last bit of cash is taken away from men, woman and children, who already have very little, it’s debilitating for those concerned,” the group said, adding that the measures would make integration more difficult.
The seizure of mobile phone data would be a “serious intrusion into people’s privacy,” it said, while the plan to make applying for citizenship harder was “political posturing” to conceal the fact that the process is already very difficult.
Last week Kickl said he would push E.U. colleagues to end the possibility of asylum applications being made in Europe. He wants a system where people can only apply for asylum in so-called “transit zones,” outside the E.U.’s borders.
He previously caused controversy earlier this year by saying he wanted to “concentrate” asylum-seekers in certain places, employing a word widely associated with Nazi camps.
