He spoke shortly after Denmark said it would enforce temporary controls on its border with Germany.
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Loekke Rasmussen said if the European Union can’t protect its external border “you will see more and more countries forced to introduce temporary border controls”.
Senior Danish politicians have denounced the move, saying it endangers the cross-border business area trumpeted as an exemplar of economic integration.
But with arrivals running at around 10,000 a week in November, mostly traveling through Denmark, the Swedish government has said it is time to tighten border controls and asylum rules. All people traveling via train or bus through the bridge or by using ferry services will be denied entry without proper documentation.
That question is already being asked by companies and commuters opposed to new ID checks at the 8-kilometer (5-mile) Oresund bridge-and-tunnel, known to European TV viewers as the focal point of the Swedish-Danish crime series “The Bridge”.
Alexander and Monica Klein from Malmö were among the first to go through one of the 34 checkpoints that have been set up at Copenhagen airport’s Kastrup train station. But it comes at a price: DSB expects the new checks will cost it €1.2 million per month – a fee it may pass on to customers. “If we hadn’t introduced ID controls, I’m anxious we’d soon have the same situation again, with about 100,000 people in just a few months in the spring, and that’s something our reception system couldn’t handle”.
Sweden has the highest number of asylum seekers in Europe after Germany.
The new stringent border checks are the latest in a line of increasingly severe measures since the migrant crisis began in the summer of 2015.
“A dark day for our Nordic region”, former center-right Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt said on his Twitter feed on Monday to describe the imposition of border checks.
More than 150,000 people have sought asylum in Sweden, which has taken in the most refugees per capita of its population in Europe. “This is not a happy moment at all”, he declared, adding that the border control at the Danish-German border will be unsystematic and so far be for ten days, but with the possibility of an extention.
Germany will carefully monitor the Danish border controls to evaluate “whether and how this affects migration northward from Germany”, Johannes Dimroth, Interior Ministry spokesman, said.
His comments have a ring of irony about them, since it was German Chancellor Angela Merkel who was widely criticized for opening the floodgates to refugees by declaring her country’s doors open to them, triggering a huge mass movement of people.
An inflatable dinghy discovered in early December on the shores of the southern town of Skillinge raised suspicions of such a crossing, but border police said it was “very unlikely” the boat had been used to such ends.
David Brax, a researcher of hate crimes at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, said the country’s center-left minority government had justified the measures on the grounds that its system for processing migrants and refugees could no longer cope with the influx.
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“Freedom of movement is an important principle, one of the biggest achievements [in the European Union] in recent years”, spokesman Martin Schaefer said.
