The federal government is piling up asylum applications

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The stack of pending asylum files at the State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) is growing and growing. At the end of January, exactly 12,768 asylum applications were being processed by the department of SP federal council member Elisabeth Baume-Schneider (59) – more than in almost five years. The Hanging Mountain was only higher in the wake of the historic 2015 refugee crisis.

The reason for the many outstanding applications is the increasing number of asylum seekers. In 2022, 24,500 applicants submitted an application, about 64 percent more than the year before. In addition, there were 75,000 applications for protection status S from people from Ukraine.

At the end of 2021, the federal government set up a task force to reduce outstanding posts. However, the newly created functions soon had to be freed up elsewhere. This is evident from the new meeting minutes of the special asylum staff, which are available on Blick on Sunday. According to this, the SEM’s resources on asylum are either “occupied with the S procedures or with the increasing number of new arrivals”.

The federal government expects 40,000 new applications

SEM spokesperson Reto Kormann: “Since June 2021, following the pandemic-related decline, the number of asylum applications has increased significantly again and the SEM’s processing capacity has been continuously exceeded – partly due to the parallel burden of the Ukraine crisis.”

The situation is expected to deteriorate further in the coming months. For 2023, the federal government expects up to 40,000 new asylum applications and other refugees from Ukraine.

Especially in the spring, the number of applications is likely to skyrocket. Kormann: “There is insufficient capacity to process the expected requests in the coming months.” The SEM is therefore “prepared” to attract more additional staff.

More mobile phone evaluations, more work

However, the SEM spokesperson also points out that recruiting staff takes time and that the newly hired employees are only “productive” after a training period of about six months. After all, the State Secretariat for Migration managed to increase the number of transactions in recent months.

Bern will soon need more money and more staff in another asylum area. In the future, the federal government in many cases wants to conduct cell phone evaluations to identify asylum seekers. The implementation of a draft adopted by parliament leads to additional financial and personnel costs. According to the Federal Council, such new tasks will be taken over by employees in the six federal asylum seekers centres.

Almost three-quarters of asylum seekers have not submitted their identity papers in recent years. For half of them, the federal government assumes that various data carriers can be evaluated in the future, such as mobile phones.

Accelerate asylum procedures

In the medium term, the federal government expects that these additional evaluation options will save costs. The asylum procedure can be accelerated if additional information about identity, nationality or travel route is available at an early stage.

Asylum seekers should only hand in electronic data carriers if personal information cannot be obtained in any other way.

Source:Blick