Woltron thinks outside the box

“There is a lot of talk, but nothing is done”

Fleeing across the sea is a great danger for refugees and often ends in death. These refugees were lucky, they were saved.(Bild: AFP or licensors)

Our government is celebrating the halving of asylum numbers. Of course, this is just an embellishment. Because what sounds good is still far too high. The reference year 2022 even exceeded the previous record of 2015.

Austria's population has grown by more than one million since 2000 due to immigration. From 2015 to 2023 alone, 407,655 asylum seekers were recorded - two thirds more than Austrian citizens in Graz. The federal government recently announced enthusiastically that there were "only" 58,686 asylum applications in 2023 - half the number in 2022. This is, of course, an embellishment: the comparative year 2022 had a particularly high level of immigration. Despite all the enthusiasm, the figures from 2023 show that the number of applications even exceeded the population of Wiener Neustadt.