Demo: Refugees with a call for help to politicians in Innsbruck on the street
On Friday evening, around 40 refugees and just as many sympathizers gathered at the Anna Column to draw attention to the situation in the refugee accommodation and the lack of work opportunities. “We need you” also sets up the asylum seeker’s call for help to politics and society.
The organizers of the rally, which started yesterday at the Anna Column and ended with a demonstration through the city center, found inhumane conditions for refugees. The exclusively male asylum seekers, who used posters and signs to draw attention to the fact that, in addition to being asylum seekers, they had also learned trades and therefore wanted to work in and for Austria, had come to Innsbruck from various refugee camps in Tyrol for the demonstration. “During the far too long asylum procedures, in which those affected wait months or years for the decisions of the BFA or the Federal Administrative Court, they are simply deprived of their rights,” says one of the organizers. “Our lives are in the documents, we can’t study, either not learn the language or work without a residence permit, we cannot keep our wives and children safe. The long wait is worse than the escape. We die slowly without being noticed. To be useful, we need a job,” said one of the asylum seekers.
record numbers
Meanwhile, FPÖ local councilor Rudi Federspiel demands that “the political competitors must finally recognize that the boat is full and they finally have to realize that they are committed to the local population and not the political representatives for young – mostly male – economic refugees and Bogus asylum seekers from Islamic states in Asia and North Africa”. By October of this year, 90,000 asylum applications had been made throughout Austria, which already means more applications than in the record year 2015. While asylum applications from people affected from Syria are mostly positive at 72 percent, applications from people from Afghanistan are decided neither positively nor negatively at 70 percent. Data from the Interior Ministry shows that more than 50,000 people are currently waiting for their asylum applications to be decided.
Read more news from Innsbruck here.