Austria Accepts Almost Three-Quarters of Refugee Quotas

Austrian Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka said that Austrian authorities will accept 37,500 refugees, compared with 90,000 received in 2015.

VIENNA (Sputnik) — The Austrian authorities have admitted almost three-quarters of its assigned quota of refugees under the limit set by the government since the beginning of 2016, Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka said on Tuesday.

Austrian authorities have stated that this year they would accept 37 500 refugees, compared with 90,000 received in 2015.

"On August 31, 2016 we have 32,036 applications for asylum and 26,419 have been accepted and are being processed," Sobotka told reporters.

He did not forecast whether there would be an increase in a number of refugees Austria could welcome the following year, and added that this would depend on the development of the situation with the closing of the Serbian-Hungarian border.

Since 2015, Europe has been beset by a massive refugee crisis, with hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants fleeing their home countries in the Middle East and North Africa to escape violence and poverty. Some 1.8 million illegal border crossings were detected by the EU border agency Frontex in 2015.