STOCKHOLM — Sweden on Thursday put into words an uncomfortable reality for Europe: If the continent isn’t going to welcome more than 1 million immigrants a year, it will have to deport large numbers of them to countries plagued by social unrest and abject poverty.
Interior Minister Anders Ygeman said Sweden could send back 60,000-80,000 asylum seekers in the coming years. Even in a country with a long history of immigration, that would be a scale of expulsions unseen before.
“The first step is to ensure voluntary returns,” Ygeman told Swedish newspaper Dagens Industri. “But if we don’t succeed, we need to have returns by coercion.”
The coercive part is where it gets uncomfortable. Packing unwilling migrants, even entire families, onto chartered airplanes bound for the Balkans, the Middle East or Africa evokes images that clash with Europe’s humanitarian ideals.
But the sharp rise of people seeking asylum in Europe last year almost certainly will lead to much higher numbers of rejections and deportations.
European Union officials have urged member countries to quickly send back those who don’t qualify for asylum so that Europe’s welcome can be focused on those who do, such as people fleeing the war in Syria.
“People who do not have a right to stay in the European Union need to be returned home,” said Natasha Bertaud, a spokeswoman for the EU’s executive Commission.
“This is a matter of credibility that we do return these people, because you don’t want to give the impression of course that Europe is an open door,” she said.
EU statistics show that most of those rejected come from the Balkans, including Albania and Kosovo, some of Europe’s poorest countries.
Many applicants running away from poverty in West Africa, Pakistan and Bangladesh also are turned away.
Even people from unstable countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia can’t count on getting asylum unless they can prove that they, personally, face grave risks at home.
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