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Sweden, Denmark introduce border checks to stem migrant flow
All travellers entering Sweden over the Oresund Bridge from Denmark, or crossing by ferry, will be refused entry to Sweden without the necessary documents.
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At the train station at Copenhagen Airport, it has set up 34 ID-control stations, and all travellers to Sweden are now required to change trains at the airport and pass through the controls.
Sweden introduced identity checks on Monday for travelers arriving from Denmark in an attempt to limit the flow of migrants into the country.
The new border checks were instigated by Sweden to try to slow an influx of migrants that is expected to reach 190,000 this year.
Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen cited the Swedish checks to justify his country’s immediate introduction of random border controls.
“We must get the number of asylum seekers down”.
Thousands of commuters daily use the Oresund Bridge – familiar to fans of the “Nordic noir” crime drama series “The Bridge” – to shuttle by vehicle, train and bus between the Danish capital Copenhagen and the Swedish city of Malmo.
Denmark has stepped up border controls at its southern boundary with Germany to stem the flow of migrants.
Sweden on Monday (4 January) launched identity checks on its border with Denmark, in a move which unravels over 60 years of free travel between the two European Union states.
The neighboring countries are connected by the longest rail and road bridge in Europe, and Denmark has been critical of Sweden’s decision to tighten the border. Nearly 50 percent of them were fleeing war and violence in Syria and about 21 percent were from Afghanistan.
For the first time since the 1950s, travelers crossing the bridge between Sweden and Denmark now need to show ID.
Sweden is the latest European country to impose the border checks, all but erasing the idea of a borderless Europe where a traveler could pass from one country into another without showing a passport. “[It is] likely the biggest and most complicated crisis we have seen this century”, Rasmussen said.
In response, Germany’s foreign ministry spokesman, Martin Schaefer, told reporters that the refugee crisis was putting Europe’s border-free Schengen area “in danger”.
“It’s basically every country for itself now”, said Mark Rhinard, an expert on the European Union at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. He echoed other German officials’ calls for a pan-European agreement on how to control the movement of migrants across borders.
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In his new year address, Denmark’s liberal prime minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, said they were prepared to impose similar controls on its border with Germany, if the Swedish passport checks left large numbers of asylum seekers stranded in Denmark.