FDP fears more ‘secondary migration’: a lot of noise about women from Afghanistan

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Afghan women fleeing the Taliban regime have been granted refugee status in Switzerland since July. This change in practice by the State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) was recently made public by “Weltwoche” – sparking outrage within the FDP.

In principle, taking in Afghan women promotes “illegal secondary migration” and creates problems with family reunification, the liberals say. Your request to the SEM: reverse the change in practice. Otherwise Switzerland risks becoming “the favorite destination country in Europe”.

However, the SEM has not decided on its own to treat Afghan women as refugees, but in accordance with the recommendations of the European Asylum Agency: Sweden and Denmark have been doing it this way for a long time, Germany has also ‘largely’ adapted its practice to the recommendations of the EU Asylum Agency, a spokesperson said. Austria, on the other hand, maintains the current refugee regime.

In reality, the new practice changes little. Afghan women have almost always been granted asylum or at least temporary admission in this country. In any case, there have been no returns from Switzerland to Afghanistan since the Taliban came to power.

The SEM expects that many temporarily admitted Afghan women and their family members will “reapply for asylum (multiple applications)”. This could lead to a more than normal increase in the number of Afghan asylum applications in the coming months – “without actually increasing the number of people coming to Switzerland.”

No social assistance if you move there

Aid organizations are already reminding those affected that they are better off with refugee status than with temporary admission, because family reunification is more strictly regulated for temporarily admitted persons; If they want to bring relatives to the country, they are not allowed to receive social assistance, among other things.

Moreover, the current debate revolves around relatively few cases. Since August 2021, approximately 2,000 Afghan women have applied for asylum. Family reunification is also limited. According to SEM figures, only 188 Afghan women have come to Switzerland alone in the past 12 months – and only six men have joined their Afghan wives through family reunification.

Nevertheless, the fundamental question remains: what to do when half of the population of 40 million people is (in principle) entitled to protection? And why does refugee status apply to Afghan women, but not to Iranian women, for example?

Neither Switzerland nor the EU currently has an answer to this.

Source:Blick