Austria caps asylum-seekers at 37500 in 2016

“We can’t take in all asylum-seekers in Austria”, Chancellor Faymann said after a national asylum summit in Vienna.

The vast majority crossed the country on their way to Germany.

Austria said it was anxious to work with the German authorities to prevent a border stand-off with Bavaria.

Governments are anxious that the onset of spring, and with it warmer temperatures, will herald a fresh spike in arrivals in the coming months.

“There will be a bundle of measures that go in the direction of securing the borders, that go in the direction of a discussion about an upper limit (to the number of migrants)”, Finance Minister Hans Joerg Schelling, a conservative, said on the sidelines of a Euromoney conference in Vienna. But he said, according to Reuters: “The German government still favours a joint European solution, whic tackles the causes of migration in order to reduce the number of refugees significantly and noticeably”.

Support has risen for the far-right Freedom Party, now the country’s most popular, and hurt the two main parties in local elections past year.

But the EU’s executive body intends to replace the regulation with a permanent quota system, which would require each bloc member to accept a set number of refugees based on its population size and other factors.

In the latest clampdown of Europe’s immigration crisis, Austria will cap the number accepted for asylum at 37,500 this year, compared to approximately 90,000 processed during 2015.

It takes them several hours or at most a day to then arrive to Serbia’s northwestern border with Croatia. Those fleeing conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq are supposed to be allowed through, but their identity papers and bags will face greater scrutiny. Austria, a small nation of 8.5 million people, has become a key transit country for hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees entering the European Union.

Mr Faymann also said he has discussed the plans “in principle” with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and their counterpart in Slovenia.

Leading children’s charities this week warned that young refugees crossing through the Balkans were at serious risk from the bitterly freezing weather and lacking adequate shelter from the snowy conditions.