When
‘Underage’ Refugees Look Anything But
Under
strain from an influx of asylum seekers claiming to be children,
Sweden is now considering instituting mandatory age tests.
BY ELISABETH
BRAWJANUARY 13, 2016
MALMÖ, Sweden —
For years, Sweden has been the favorite destination for unaccompanied
children seeking asylum in Europe. Its reputation as both a
comfortable place to wait out the application process and a generous
granter of asylum approval has spread far and wide. Last year it
received almost twice as many underage asylum-seekers as the No. 2
destination, Germany; at the end of the year in particular, the
number of children arriving alone in Sweden skyrocketed. But lately,
some of these recent arrivals have appeared — at least according to
their fellow asylum-seekers and Swedish officials — well, mature
for their ages.
“In my [home for
unaccompanied minors], there are so many people who look like 32 but
say they’re 16,” reports Jamal Hawilo, a 17-year-old Palestinian
whose slender frame and not-quite-settled bass voice suggest that he
is indeed an adolescent. “There’s one guy I’m absolutely 100
percent convinced he’s 35.”
Jamal, who arrived
in Sweden in August with his 16-year-old brother, isn’t the only
one who noticed some rather seasoned-looking men among the
1,000-2,000 unaccompanied minors who were arriving in Sweden each
week over the summer and fall. Now, in the midst of a fierce debate
over asylum policy that saw Sweden backtrack on its generous
open-door position late last year, Swedes are also weighing how to
treat migrants who claim to be children but lack identification.
“The problem is
not the volume, but the fact that people” are claiming to be
children, said Mats Johansson, chair of the Stockholm Free World
Forum, a right-leaning think tank and a member of parliament from
Sweden’s center-right Moderate Party. “Adult Afghans are not
children in need of protection.”
The government and
the country’s Migration Agency have long been reluctant to
medically test unaccompanied minors’ ages as a standard procedure.
“The government has been hoping that silence about age cheating
will solve the issue,” said Johansson. But now as part of the
recent reversal of its open-door asylum policy, the government is
considering making age-determination tests standard practice for
unaccompanied minors. The test, which involves dental and wrist-bone
X-rays, can usually determine a young person’s age within a
one-year margin. A Justice Ministry spokesman told Foreign Policy
that a proposal is expected within the next six months.
There are many
reasons a 30-year-old asylum-seeker would claim to be an adolescent.
In Sweden, if a newly arrived asylum-seeker claims to be a minor, the
Migration Agency has to treat him as such during the application
process until it has ample reason to contend he’s an adult — and
that means extra protections, enshrined in international law.
Signatories to the 1989 U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child
have agreed to give children — that is, anyone under age 18 —
“special safeguards and care.” In practice in Sweden, this means
that while an adult, for example, can be denied asylum on the grounds
that some parts of his country are safe and can then be returned to
an unfamiliar place, a child will not be sent to a different part of
his home country. Children applying for asylum in Sweden also don’t
face the prospect of being returned to the EU country where they
first arrived and are, if approved, allowed to bring their families
to join them.
During the week of
Nov. 9, exactly 2,942 unaccompanied minors applied for asylum in
Sweden, which means that children arriving alone made up nearly
one-third of the 10,553 asylum applications filed that week. That’s
an increase of 635 children compared with the week before. In total,
8,808 unaccompanied minors applied for asylum in November, a small
drop from the record month of October, when 9,339 children did so. In
2014 — the latest year for which data are available from the
European Union’s statistical body, Eurostat — Sweden was the
undisputed No. 1 among destinations for unaccompanied minors, with
7,049 applications. Second-ranked Germany received 4,400
applications, followed by Italy at 2,505.
It’s unclear how
many of these applicants are adult men claiming to be 17 or younger,
as the Swedish Migration Agency only investigates applicants’ ages
later in the asylum process. But Migration Agency figures show that
46 percent the unaccompanied minors who applied for asylum in Sweden
last year were males giving their age as 16 or 17. Another 40 percent
were males ages 13 to 15. “We Swedes are undemanding and naive in
not wanting to check unaccompanied minors’ ages,” said David
Eberhard, a leading Swedish psychiatrist and expert on children’s
psychological development. “That attitude is connected to the
undemanding way in which we rear our children.”
The influx of what
appear to be grown men posing as adolescents, however, has created a
vigorous debate that rages on Internet forums and social media. Local
newspapers often report on the unaccompanied minors, and when the
photos seem to depict men rather than boys, ordinary citizens proceed
to research their ages by, for example, locating their Facebook
profiles. “The guy is not 17 years old, but 34”, claimed a user
recently on Flashback, a popular website among age-cheating
detectives, about an unaccompanied minor featured in a newspaper
report.
“The
question of age-cheating among asylum-seekers is a fraught one,
explained Stefan Olsson, a political columnist and local politician
for the Moderate Party. No one wants to accuse children in danger of
lying.”
The question of
age-cheating among asylum-seekers is a fraught one, explained Stefan
Olsson, a political columnist and local politician for the Moderate
Party. No one wants to accuse children in danger of lying. But
“because the establishment doesn’t discuss the issue openly, and
critics of the very liberal policy towards unaccompanied minors are
often accused of being racists, the discussion is mostly conducted on
the Internet” — where it often turns one-sided.
The New Year’s Eve
sex attacks in Cologne, Germany, have added a new aspect to the
debate. Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s leading daily, recently reported
that last year at “We are Sthlm,” a large youth festival, 90
young men were removed by the police after attacking female
participants. The newspaper quotes one of the police officers as
saying that the police treated it as a sensitive matter because a
number of the men were understood to be unaccompanied minors.
Sweden’s
commitment to underage asylum-seekers is evident in the housing
provided for unaccompanied minors while their asylum claims are
decided, a process that on average can take some 200 days. Their
home-like residences typically feature modern furniture, televisions,
game rooms, and well-equipped kitchens; adults and families are
housed in more modest accommodations. “They give you money for the
bus, for the [mobile] phone, for a laptop,” says Jamal’s brother,
Wael, of the residence where he lives with Jamal and some 10 other
boys.
The children are
looked after around the clock by social workers, and each child is
also represented by a guardian whose task is to protect his
interests. While humane, the policy of enhanced care for children
means these cozy homes can be hugely expensive. To cover the cost of
caring for asylum-seekers, the Swedish government is using funds from
its aid and development budget: Every new asylum-seeker means 499
kronor per day ($60) is taken from development-aid recipients.
Local authorities
are reimbursed 1,900 kronor ($220) per child per day by the
government, but because they don’t have enough capacity, they also
buy services from private companies. In some cases the prices charged
by such companies have tripled, leaving local authorities out of
pocket by large amounts. As a result of the cost and the enormous
increase in arriving children, city authorities are struggling to
provide room and staff, and more than 30 cities have already reported
themselves to the government as unable to care for the children. In
October, the government announced that it will introduce pared-down
living arrangements for 16- and 17-year-olds, which will include less
adult supervision.
Jamal and Wael
traveled to Sweden from the Palestinian refugee camp of Sabra just
outside Beirut, where they grew up, last August. At home in Sabra,
there are no opportunities for Palestinians, Wael explained. Plus,
their estranged father had not paid back loans to several people, who
are now threatening to harm Jamal and Wael. To get a better life for
his grandsons, Jamal and Wael’s grandfather, with whom they lived,
arranged for them to travel to Denmark with a Lebanese soccer team.
As planned, the two teenagers absconded to Sweden.
After arriving at
Central Station in the southern Swedish city of Malmö, the boys made
their way to the Migration Agency registration office, where the
agency assigned them to one of the 34 refugee residences here. In the
youth residences, Afghan males dominate: another on-the-ground
expression of a geopolitical reality. Because Sweden grants permanent
residency to all Syrians, Syrian men don’t need to pretend to be
boys, and only 3,777 of the unaccompanied minors arriving in Sweden
last year came from the ravaged country. But with no such blanket
asylum in place for Afghans, they — and a likewise disproportionate
number of Somalis and Eritreans — often appear to claim asylum as
unaccompanied minors. Recent figures provided by the Migration Agency
show that more than half of the 41,564 Afghans who arrived in Sweden
in 2015 claimed as unaccompanied minors.
With family members
looking out for them, the Hawilo brothers are not abandoned. But they
arrived in Sweden on their own, and as far as the law is concerned,
that makes them unaccompanied minors. Now they’re attending a
city-run school program for newly arrived refugees while their asylum
claims are processed. If they get asylum, they want to bring their
grandparents here.
Over 2,000 of the
children who have recently arrived in Malmö have been assigned to
youth residences while awaiting their asylum decisions; others are
housed in neighboring towns. To keep up with the increasing numbers
of unaccompanied minors, Malmö’s City Council has hired 1,000 new
staff, mostly social workers. “Last spring we had 120 places for
unaccompanied minors; we now have 2,500, but this is it,” explained
Lene Cordes, Malmö’s director of youth welfare. “There’s no
more space we can use.” There’s no more staff either. Cordes has
even created a 15-person unit charged with making sure the
child-refugee homes are always fully staffed.
At his residence,
Jamal reports, many of the teenagers he suspects of actually being
30-somethings shave their arms in order to look younger. But, he
says, “I tell them, ‘The Migration Agency is smarter than that.
They check your teeth.’” If social workers sense a resident in a
child-refugee home is much older, they can request that he be removed
— a policy also designed to keep younger residents safe. However,
according to social authorities, it happens extremely rarely
Previously,
unaccompanied minors’ state-appointed guardians could request
age-determination tests by means of dental and wrist-bone X-rays if
the Migration Agency decided the children were older than they
claimed; these could become standard if the Justice Ministry’s
proposal goes forward. But Anders Hjern, a professor of pediatrics at
the Centre for Health Equity Studies in Stockholm, told Foreign
Policy that while the method works well in determining ages between
14 and 17 years, it’s less than accurate in people between 17 and
30 — a tricky problem when so much hinges on the true age of older
applicants.
Another driving
force behind this spate of unaccompanied minors — real or fake —
is that Swedish law allows parents, guardians, and siblings of
unaccompanied minors who have been granted asylum as refugees to join
them in Sweden. By contrast, adults granted asylum are not
automatically permitted to bring their parents. Parents and siblings
apply for residence permits at a local consulate, and armed with the
acceptance letter they can make their way to Sweden. To send along a
minor, or someone who pretends to be one, as an advance party is seen
by some as a more cost-effective — or indeed the only possible —
way of bringing over a whole family.
Qassim Ali, a
17-year-old from the Syrian city of Daraa, arrived in Malmö last
May, having made the journey north from Turkey via Hungary. At first,
his family of six had wanted to flee to Sweden together, but with
smugglers now charging more than $10,000 a head, his parents
concluded that escaping together would be impossible. Instead,
Qassim’s father paid a smuggler the requested $15,000 for Qassim,
who made his way to Turkey while his parents and three younger
siblings traveled to the United Arab Emirates. “We decided that I
would go to Sweden first and they’d join me,” Qassim explains.
When he receives
asylum and permanent residence, his family will have permission to
join him, meaning they will be able to travel by plane — a legal
way of traveling to Sweden and one that’s safer and cheaper than
journeying through Greece or the Balkans. It’s a tactic smugglers
have taken to advertising: “They tell families in countries like
Iraq and Afghanistan that it’s easy to get to Sweden by sending an
older boy first and then the family can come after,” reported Terje
Torvik, the Migration Agency’s point man for unaccompanied minors.
“Smugglers make money on these journeys, so it’s in their
interest to advertise Sweden as a paradise for unaccompanied minors.”
But sending an older teen ahead has its risks too, as the
family-unification policy doesn’t apply once an asylum-seeker turns
18.
The government’s
plans to increase age tests may be a measure of last resort as Sweden
grapples with the youthful-refugee surge. But it’s nonetheless a
radical change in Swedish politics. Noted Eberhard: “Just a couple
of months ago, you would have been called a racist for suggesting age
tests.”
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