Portugal has already received 1415 refugees from Greece and Italy

Portugal still has 1,536 people to meet the quota

Portugal received 1,415 refugees from Greece and Italy until September 4 and since the launch of the emergency mechanism for the relocation of people two years ago, according to data released today by the European Commission.

According to the 15th report on resettlement and resettlement programs, Portugal received 1,116 refugees transferred from Greece and Italy 299.

Portugal still has 1,536 people to fulfill the quota of 2,951 allocated.

In total, 27,695 people were replaced in Europe (19,244 from Greece and 8,451 from Italy), in a program in which, in addition to the 28 Member States, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.

This number represents less than a third of the 98,000 that the Member States had committed to redistribute until September, according to the same data released today by the European Commission.

“Most migrants arriving in Italy are not eligible. In fact, the number of people to be relocated is much lower than expected,” said European Commissioner for Migration Dimitris Avramopóulos, quoted by the agency as saying. EFE.

The European Commission insists that progress has been made and that, since the majority of migrants arriving in Italy and Greece “were not eligible”, the total number has been revised downwards from the initial commitment.

Currently, indicated the Commission, there are about 2,800 people waiting for relocation in Greece and another 2,000 in Italy waiting to know if they are eligible. Italy arrives new applicants “every day”, “so all parties should continue efforts”.

“The Member States should speed up the management of relocation transfers and provide sufficient guarantees to all applicants. Italy should speed up the identification and registration of eligible candidates (especially Eritreans),” Brussels states in the report.

Two years after the launch of the emergency mechanism to help Greece and Italy deal with the influx of migrants, a monthly average of 2,300 transfers made since February 2017 was reached for almost all Member States.

However, Brussels notes that 2,800 people are still being recalled from Greece and that new candidates arrive every day in Italy, calling on the Member States to speed up procedures for receiving people.

Brussels also welcomes the fact that Austria has begun to relocate people from Italy and that the first replacements from Italy to Slovakia are already being prepared.

On the other hand, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland continue to violate their legal obligations, not having relocated a single person (Hungary and Poland) or having made no replacement available for more than one year (Czech Republic), and the Commission opened infringement proceedings against those Member States.

With regard to the resettlement of refugees who live in camps outside the European Union, 76 of the 191 people they proposed to host have already been received by Portugal, with 63 reinstalled from Egypt, 12 from Turkey and one from Morocco.

In total, the EU and the four associated countries received 17,305 out of 22,504.

 

Wave of re-migration – Eastern Europe’s wave of emigration may have crested

Thriving economies and low costs of living are luring expats home from the West

WHEN Richard Fetyko left his native Slovakia in 1992 for a high-school study-abroad program, he planned to return at the end of the year. Instead, he spent 22 years in America, earning university degrees and working in banking and on Wall Street. “I didn’t really see myself able to apply my skills in Slovakia,” Mr. Fetyko says. But as Slovakia’s economy matured, that started to change. In 2014 he got an offer from an investment firm in Bratislava and came home.

Mr. Fetyko was part of a wave. From 1992 to 2015, so many people left eastern Europe that its population shrank by 18m, or about 6%, according to UN figures. The trend accelerated as the region’s countries entered the European Union. It was a sour turn for the EU’s new members: rather than making them as rich as western Europe, accession lured their workers to move there.

In the West, especially Britain and France, that led to fears of “Polish plumbers” undercutting local wages. On August 23rd Emmanuel Macron started a trip to three central and eastern European countries to discuss how to stem the flow. Yet there are signs that it may already be ending. Thriving economies, rising wages and low costs of living seem to be drawing more émigrés home. A report in July by Colliers, a real-estate firm, heralded a “labor-force boomerang” as professionals come back from the west.

The EU’s lack of visa requirements makes internal migration hard to track, but some figures are suggestive. Since 2010, net emigration has fallen in nine of the 11 post-communist EU members. Net migration to Britain from the eastern countries that joined the EU in 2004, which was above 30,000 in every year from 2010 to 2015, fell to 5,000 last year. That was partly because of Brexit, but partly a broader phenomenon of rising demand for labor in eastern Europe. “It’s not old people, it’s workers that are returning,” says Mark Robinson, the author of the Colliers report.

Jobs are easy to find: unemployment rates run from 5.3% in Romania down to a remarkable 2.9% in the Czech Republic. Fully 73% of Hungarian manufacturers say they cannot find the workers they need. That drives wages higher: salaries are up 5% in the Czech Republic compared with a year ago, and in Hungary by an extraordinary 15%, helped by a big hike in the minimum wage. Tax levels, compared with western Europe, are rock-bottom: the top income-tax rate is just 25% in Slovakia and 10% in Bulgaria.

Cheap housing is another lure. Per square meter, a flat in Prague costs about half as much as one in Dublin, and one-seventh as much as in London. The cost of living is so low that an analysis of net incomes in Europe by Deloitte, a consultant, listed the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland as three of the continent’s top five earners (alongside Switzerland and Malta).

But it is not just finances that bring expats home. In 2010 Milos Fusek left his hometown of Dubnica nad Vahom, in western Slovakia, for Ireland, where he worked in a warehouse and later in logistics and marketing. In 2015 he came home to run a window-manufacturing company with his father. For him, a family was the decisive factor. Others find they can reach more senior positions in their home countries than in the west.

And there is another reason: a sense of patriotic optimism. Tomas Melisko, a Slovak who earned his law degree in Britain, gave up a banking job in Vienna in 2015 to work as a real-estate consultant in Bratislava. Besides being closer to friends and family, he feels that “by coming back I bring the skills I have accumulated, and give back to society”. Westerners worried that eastern Europeans will continue to flood westwards should keep in mind that many of them love their countries, too.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “Wave of re-migration”